Enhancing Leadership Maturity Through Self-Reflection

Leadership maturity is expanding our ability to navigate complexity through holding multiple perspectives – even and especially those with whom we disagree, seeing the systems that surround every person, place, and thing, and asking questions that have no immediate answer without blame or shame.

CLIENT STORY 

A client was contemplating a problem. She is the leader of a local private school. She had recently hired a co-leader. This leader’s job was to manage the teachers.  

The co-leader had worked at the school for years as a teacher. She studied the school’s philosophy in depth. She was well prepared on paper for the job. She was not as prepared for the complexity. 

She was an effective teacher. But the complexity of her new job had exponentially increased. Now she had to address the needs of a whole school of teachers, make sure all parents felt heard and had their needs met, hold an educational direction, and meet the students with discipline and care for their perspectives.  

The increased complexity prompted her to examine her leadership skills and capacity. She became curious through self-reflection, asked new questions of herself and others, gathered multiple perspectives and allowed those to influence her, and through these acts understood the impact of multiple systems including the students, classroom dynamics, teacher styles, and capabilities, parents’ perspectives, staff challenges and capabilities, the practices of surrounding educational institutions, and public policies. This was difficult, time-consuming, and uncomfortable. Through the discomfort, she grew her capacity to lead. 

IDENTIFY 

As you gain or desire more responsibility in your role or organization, it is essential to expand your capacity for complexity. In complex situations, you encounter decisions, events, or challenges you singularly don’t know how to navigate. If you think you can solve them or know the answer, this is a sure sign that you are in a less complex state of maturity.

By nature, complexity involves interwoven competing commitments with no easy resolution. By nature, the type of complexity we face in the world today requires collaboration and long-term strategizing about the impacts of our actions today on the future without adding a profit margin to the choices.

Skills that help us mature require asking new questions, taking multiple perspectives, and seeing the interwoven systems. These simple, yet hard to execute skills build your leadership maturity. This is not a linear process, and it happens over years of practice combined with a conscious letting go of behaviors that no longer serve our future.

Since A. H. Maslow’s 1943 paper, A Theory of Human Motivation, much research has been done to evolve developmental and behavioral scientists’ understanding of behavioral economics, and the psychological maturity and development of adults. Studies by Jane Loevinger in the 1970’s, and Susan Cook-Greuter’s work in the 1980’s, and Ken Wilbur’s work of the 1990’s, built on Jean Piaget’s (1936), Maslow’s, and Erik Erickson’s (1963) theories. They – along with others who study human development and growth – have come up with similar distinctions for stages of consciousness and psychological maturity. These factor into leadership theory because at each stage we gain an expanded ability to hold more complexity. The complexity we gain is not simply in knowledge – this knowledge or skill expansion is called horizontal development. It is essential and it is only one aspect of growing as a leader.

To lead today, in our world of complex interdependencies, we must also vertically expand our ability to hold more complexity. To know in our bones that our truth is not the truth. To honor that there are systems we don’t intimately know and therefore cannot speak confidently about. Lastly, no one knows the answers to the questions that plague our future – how do we secure a healthy planetary legacy for generations to come, how do we end war and genocide, and how do we end violence as a way to solve our problems. We also, due to the limitations of our educational and family systems, cannot gather in community to solve these challenges because many do not have the skills to communicate in a way that creates connection and understanding, not division or righteousness.

To illustrate the pathway to expand our ability to hold complexity as a leader, the chart above displays various stages of development theories. Though the stage names vary, the fundamental characteristics of each stage remain the same. Each stage defines behaviors, actions, and logic that you would witness in a person. People reveal their stage through their representation of the intersections of small and large systems at play with or without blaming or shaming others, their ability or inability to see multiple perspectives, and the breadth, openness, and unanswerable nature of the questions they ask.

Leadership maturity is not easy. It means wrestling with the incongruence inside us and in the culture that surrounds us. It is not about defining us versus them and who is right or wrong. Right and wrong simplifies complex problems into blame and shame which has no long-term impact or influence on the outcomes.

According to the research by Robert Kegan, a developmental psychologist who researches and teaches at Harvard along with supportive graduate students and other academics, statistics show about 93% of the population on average falls into the most common stages. In his model, these categories are the Socialized Mind/Third Order of leadership maturity and the Self-Authoring Mind/Fourth Order of leadership maturity.

On the colorful graph above, you see how Kegan’s levels of consciousness map to other theorists. According to research, seventeen of the 93% percent of people operate from a less complex level of maturity. These stages say nothing about intelligence. You can have a high IQ and still be in a less complex stage of maturity. You can also have a low IQ and operate from a more complex stage of maturity. The research goes on to say ten of the 93% percent operate at the edge of self-authoring and self-transforming. Less than 1% consistently act from the Fifth Order – the Self-Transforming Mind.

If we are to evolve our ability to create a future without genocide, rape, and violence, we must undertake the costs of maturing. Leaders do not mature through reading books or taking courses, though those constructs are supportive of creating the mental foundation for psychological maturity. Leaders mature through calculated risk-taking in relationships, reflection, and shifted action. As leaders live within a system, their actions have an impact on the people around them. Wrestling with the dissonance between where you are as a leader and what you need to do to grow is part of the path to a more complex stage of maturity.

These stages are not linear nor are they fixed. We have a center of gravity in one stage. Our practices, values, and behaviors align with that stage. We can also act from a more complex stage, though we have a hard time repeating the actions as a norm. We can also descend to a less complex state of mind when under extreme stress.

Maturity as a leader is not something that comes easily. You need to feel the heat to grow. Curated disruptive experiences, exposure to new perspectives, and opportunities to make sense of things as a collective are foundational to increasing your maturity as a leader. 

The key to continued development is leaning into discomfort. This happens through a daily application of skills like paraphrasing to understand another person, seeing the positive intention of those you disagree with, and inviting complex situations and skillfully conversing to a resolution at the edge of your ability. The thread that binds these experiences into an expanded stage is reflection on how your actions impact others and the system. Reflect, then, recover, choose discomfort, and go back in for more.  

There is no one right stage of development. As a leader, you will have people at various stages. Your job is to expand your capacity to lead by acknowledging the gifts each person brings and setting up guidelines for their impact. If you have a person who operates from a lower capacity for complexity, and you want them to run a complex department because of the breadth of their horizontal skills and knowledge, you must give them clear and direct guidelines of what is acceptable behavior, and the level of decisions and changes they can make. If they go outside these guidelines, you must redirect while maintaining their dignity. After all, you as the leader, chose them for this position.

NOTICE 

To find your stage of development, notice your behaviors, values, interests, and responses to situations. Then compare your data to feedback you have received from your peers, co-workers, family, and friends. 

If your data matches their data, you more accurately see the impact of your behaviors. This is a strong place to grow from as a leader. If the data you gather is different than their data, it is time to build more awareness of your impact on others and ask for support. Truthfully seeing our impact is one of the most difficult tasks of a human as a leader.  

If you dismiss any feedback as irrelevant, this shows a lower stage of maturity. In more complex stages of maturity, you listen to feedback, understand how you could impact another in a way that is different than you intended, and incorporate the feedback into a shift in your understanding of impact in general.

Below is a series of attributes and behaviors of the stages. As a reference, most of my clients believe they are strategists, few actually are.

EXPLORE 

When faced with complexity, many people in earlier stages of leadership maturity want to reduce it to the most achievable denominator and solve it. Solutions are built for the challenge at hand instead of learning more about the underlying systemic issues that cause the problem in the first place. Sometimes we think we know, but often, given that 93% of people operate a lower level of maturity than is necessary to solve complex challenges, you likely don’t know enough on your own, even through reading books and studies, to solve or understand the systemic issues that caused the problem in the first place.

To uncover more about your level of maturity, and gain the ability to hold more complexity, explore your assumptions. If you think a person is slow, trying to undermine you, or any other judgment, explore the data that gives you this impression and then add data that is exactly the opposite. It is akin to two of Byron Katie’s four questions: Is it true? Can you absolutely know it’s true? Then I would ask, what would you think of this person if the opposite was true? To do that, what would you have to believe about yourself?

Explore other people’s perspectives. Take someone you don’t know or don’t hang out with much out to lunch. Ask them about their lives. Ask them what they are working on and simply listen. Then paraphrase, so what I hear is …. DO NOT SOLUTION. What you will find is you become a trusted thinking partner for this person, and you expand your capacity to see multiple perspectives.

If you believe in a merit-based system where one person’s behavior, accomplishments, or character supports their success, ask yourself what privileges that person has had in their lifetime: Are they white? Are they a man? Did they grow up in the middle class or higher? Did they go to college? Did their family pay for college?  Are their parents still married?

You can continue the questioning if you want, and I hope what you will notice from global leadership role statistics, is that people in leadership roles around the world come from a place of privilege – not all of them, but most of them. Take some time to explore why that is and what you can do as a leader to change these statistics.

APPLY  

Maturity is something we can seek, but people rarely do. In our culture, we are not taught how to move toward physically uncomfortable and reputationally risky growth opportunities. On top of that, we are not taught the skills to manage this discomfort, nor do we have a risk-free place to practice those skills.  

When you encounter an increase in complexity or a problem you don’t know how to fix, the first step is to breathe before you take action. Conscious breathing settles your nervous system. We do our best work with a settled nervous system. Consciously breathe until you yawn, sigh, or feel a dropping into your body. It may take a while if this is your first time.

If you feel yourself moving to solve, do not act. First, settle through breath. The longer you remain in a state of inaction the more uncomfortable you become. The longer you stay here the more comfortable you become with this form of discomfort. The more comfortable you become with discomfort, the more likely you are to expand your capacity for complexity.

To increase the possibility of developing into a more mature leader:

• Seek out disruptive experiences. Breathe and remain as calm and objective as you can for as long as you can. Once you become reactive, politely leave the situation. Next time, try to stay longer.
• Expose yourself to new perspectives. Seek out people who think differently than you. Ask them curious questions from a non-judgmental place. When you feel at the end of a line of questioning, pause, reflect, and find a new level of curiosity. The more frequently you pause at the edge of what you know, the more experience you get in traveling beyond that place. 
• Reflect actively through therapy, coaching, or conversations with friends. Or journal alternative thoughts. Thoughts that scare you. Create your own disruption from a place of unconditional positive regard for yourself and others, not from a place of judgment.

The Body Doesn’t Lie

Risk Management Through Somatic-based Learning

During situations that increase stress, our fundamental capability to gracefully navigate risk exists both in the mind and in the body. The body helps the mind decipher our course of action.

Through the systems that surround us, we learn ways to ignore, dismiss, or override the body. This is beneficial. Instead of screaming out in pain or lashing out in anger, we modulate and use skills to manage or talk about our experience. These patterns of containment and meaning making have a cost. They limit access to our body and mind as a resource.

In our culture, our body is more of a vehicle than a co-pilot. We underestimate and underutilize the power of the body to help us thrive.

Our soma — our body and brain — work together. When we know how they work in tandem, we gain perspective that allows choice in our response. Our body becomes a conscious co-pilot.

To manage risk through the body happens in three ways. We learn how our mind and body choose, decipher, and optimize information to create our story. We learn how our body responds to stress to manage our basic needs to thrive. And we learn ways to increase and understand the communication between the two.

These insights bring clarity and confidence to our response. It allows us to be in choice — open and flexible to alternative perspectives. It helps us create our own safety net to manage risk with others through the co-modulation of our experience in our body and with others.

Managing risk is an essential skill toward a sustainable and thriving world. One that creates space for all people to be unique and contribute to the whole. It makes a better way possible. It uses a common crisis we all face — managing intra- and inter-personal risk — and offers a step toward a new vision.

The Body – The Key to Risk Management

As a species, we are hard-wired to pay attention to discomfort. Discomfort alerts us that something is off. Yet, discomfort also helps us grow. It informs us of the edges of our capacity. Physical discomfort that we choose is easier to understand and navigate. Interpersonal discomfort is complex and risky.

We learn to navigate physical discomfort. You name an objective, train and practice, take ibuprofen when you overexert, and try again if you fail.

We are not taught how to navigate interpersonal discomfort. It is assumed that we know how with no objective, training, practice, and without failing. When we inevitably fail, we often hide our failure. We feel embarrassed. We are unaware that the complex results of interpersonal discomfort is interwoven in our bodies and stories.

We feel risk in interpersonal situations because something is at stake for us. Our body/brain system contains evolutionary layers that manage our needs for safety, belonging, and dignity. These are layered into our body, nervous system, and brain. These layers and corresponding needs optimize our ability to thrive. Every person has a different way to manage these needs and each need has a different meaning to each person.

Conscious awareness of how we respond to interpersonal stress gives us a clue into how we manage our need for safety, belonging, and dignity. It also offers us an advantage. We understand the edges of our capability, know when we are close to the edge, and employ strategies to optimize our response. When we bring consciousness to our responses and patterns, we uncover a key to managing risk through our body.

Basic Needs to Thrive

We are a complex interchange woven of intricate threads of connection via nerve pathways, fascia, and organs. You are the result of years of patterning, winnowing, and practice.

Our distributed nervous system – the nerve pathways from our skin to our gut – interprets the world through sensation. These sensations stimulate chemicals that send signals via the nervous system to our body and brain that generate the impulse for all we do – our thoughts, emotions, and actions.

The systems that surround you provide implicit and explicit guidelines for how to behave. In order to stay safe, belong, and have dignity, you learn, adopt, and adhere to these implicit guidelines. You disregard aspects of yourself that feel unsafe and adopt practices and habits that help you belong. Through this process, you walk your path of dignity.

The result feels like you. You became your habits. You are so fully your habits that to think outside of your box or act in a way that is different or have a bigger, new, burst of emotion is disruptively uncomfortable. It actually hurts inside of your body. Your stomach is upset, your breath gets short, you feel sick, your throat gets sore, your body becomes tight and hard to relax, and many other physical manifestations of your discomfort.

These are your body’s alarm bells when you take new action. Maybe you are in a difficult conversation, or you take the lead in a new way, or bring your voice when you are normally quiet, if the move is new to you, your body responds. It sets in motion a series of chemical processes that influence your thoughts, mood, and actions to bring you back to normal – to homeostasis.

Homeostasis[1] happens when your body is at rest. Your rest and my rest are different. Not only is your essential purpose fundamentally different than anyone else – more about that later – but the way we were shaped to feel safe, belong, and have dignity is different. Every single person on the planet has a slightly different version of homeostasis. And when anyone’s homeostasis is disrupted their system sets off alarm bells. What disrupts our system might be different, but we all get disrupted.

Disruption is generated from a sensation. A sense of something outside of or inside you that challenges your homeostasis. These sensations initiate chemical signals along your neural pathways. Your body and brain respond to these signals in their patterned way.

We react to maintain safety, stay in connection with our tribe, and uphold our dignity. If we don’t know these needs exist and do not understand how to manage them, we get taken on a wild ride through waves of emotion or weeks of shutdown until we arrive at a place stable enough to renegotiate the relationship. Occasionally, we become stuck in our response.

With awareness of our three basic needs to thrive – safety, connection, and dignity – and how we become reactive interpersonally, we gain language to name how our body interacts with the mind. This gives us insight into our interpersonal risk management and when our reaction puts others at risk.

Stress

Interpersonal challenge ensues when stress increases. The part of our brain responsible for complex thought neurochemically goes offline when we react, and we revert to our well-practiced, less flexible habits.[2]

Not all stress is bad. Stress brings us to the edge of our comfort zone. This grows our capacity. It can also push us out of what Daniel Siegel calls our window of tolerance[3] and set us into reactivity.

What we react to is different for all of us. This is called bias. The patterned way your body and mind respond to stimuli from your environment.

You generate assumptions about events and people from your deep memory. You believe these assumptions to be true. But they are not. They are simply well-practiced assumptions that appear to be truth because you gather the data that makes them true.

Change blindness[4] is the study or how our brain fills in details of experiences that are not there. The science behind change blindness shows of the 11 million bits of new data per second people observe, our body and brain take in only about 50 bits or less than 1%. Our body/brain system generates over 99% of the information we believe to be in front of us from our deep memory.

Your brain generates a series of predictions says Eric Vance[5] from the 1% of new data you take in. You pull historical stories about the event and create new stories to make sense of it. While your brain strives to make meaning of the event, your body also adjusts – neurochemically. You show your response through emotions and actions. You call a friend or cry or get angry at the dog or a fence post. You respond to the events in your patterned way. In a way that maintains your version of safety, connection, and dignity.

This is how the body/brain system works. It uses your life experience to generate possible outcomes from the data and then takes action. It handles the situation in your habitual way.

This way may be ideal for you. But it may not be ideal for others. Or maybe you are tired of producing the same results from your response. Change is possible. It begins with sensation.

Evolution

The brain is an efficient, pattern detection organ. It evolved in four layers[6] beginning with the distributed nervous system – the pathways of nerves throughout our body. As we evolved, our early organisms had the ability to sense and move. They would move and when they sensed a block, signals would travel to ganglia – nerve clusters – along a central line of nerves and initiate a new path of travel.

We sense through our nerves close to the edges of our body. This evolutionary layer still exists. It exists as our sensory-motor nervous system. Its foundation is our sense of touch, smell, taste, sight, and sound. Senses also include internal sensations of the body, specifically the gut and heart – organs that have more neural synapses than the brain. Sensation is the foundation of our awareness.

Through evolution, we added capability. As the brain stem developed, it allowed for centralized reflexes and impulses. We could fight, flee, or freeze. This aspect of the brain manages our safety. Species were no longer at the mercy of their environment, they gained agency.

When mammals evolved, they needed a quick way to communicate with their young without words. The limbic system was the second centralized mechanism to layer on top of the other two. It enabled connection. This system interprets signals from the brain and body of another creature and takes action. Like a herd of zebras, all organized with their heads out and butts in to see 360 degrees around the herd.[7] They do this without coordinating. It just happens. Just as we know when something is off in a friend.

The last layer to develop was our neocortex. It is responsible for dignity, social connection, and the management of our place in the pecking order. This is the place that literally gets shut out when we become reactive. We lose access to complex thought and flexibility.

These evolutionary layers exist in the brain and nervous system. Each part has a role in managing your safety, connection, and dignity. All parts work together to optimize your ability to thrive. If you do not know these are at play, you get stuck in your habit pattern of thought, mood, and action. You do not understand that these are simply practiced responses. To create a new output, you practice something else. Which is not easy.

As the Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman[8] states, the main way the brain operates – what he calls system one thinking – is lazy. The brain already uses 20% of our body’s resources. Taking in new data and making new predictions uses more energy. To save energy and optimize the entire body/brain system, the body prefers to use habit patterns from our deep memory to respond to the world.

If you have not been taught how and why to interrupt these habits, you reenact them. Sometimes you hope for new results from the same behavior, skills, or experiences. Other times, you settle for what you get. Never knowing that you can or how to change them.

The results are predictable. Our habit pattern of thought, emotion, and action is the fastest path to regain our comfort which equates in our body/brain to survival.

Modern ecological research purports that survival is not the goal of all organisms. The goal of all organisms is to thrive[9].

This is why trees in the forest cooperate for light and resources[10]. Trees in the forest people! Trees in the forest cooperate to share resources and thrive. We can too.

We have greatly underestimated our body/brain system. We use it in the way we were taught. It is time to innovate and explore the power of our body/mind to connect rather than compete. Change becomes possible through awareness.

The Mind

Awareness has everything to do with mitigating risk of any kind. To mitigate risk does not mean to strive for comfort. Far from it. To mitigate risk means to do whatever you can to be in conversation about risk before the risky situation happens.

Risk is many things. Risk is a difficult conversation. It threatens your habits of safety, connection, or dignity. Risk is putting your life in the hands of people you marginally trust. Risk is not having the conversations up front and saving them for a better time.

Interpersonal risk is not an easy path. It means you actively build resources that help you navigate complexity. The foundational resource is awareness.

If you are aware, you feel and notice your psycho-neurobiological system at work. If you are not, a silent system is working in the background that returns you to a constant state of homeostasis at all costs.

At the slightest hint of something upsetting, our rapid-fire, autonomic processes bring us back to our normal. They generate what we see and eliminate anything that threatens our safety, connection, or dignity. Even when the uncomfortable action moves you toward who you want to become or the direction you hope to move, your system tries to stop you.

Your body’s systems help you survive. You may appreciate your system for this. But it is not the way of the future. The system does not yet know the way. You must teach it.

Throughout the last 2,000 years, people have known that awareness is the key to change. They have worked to wake up their observer. To see clearly how they become swept away by their experiences.

The practices they use are quite simple, easy to employ anywhere, and effective. Some people know these practices and choose to use them. Others know they should use them but don’t. More balk at the idea that breath or awareness has anything to do with mitigating risk.

The science is clear. Our nervous system operates autonomically – under our level of consciousness. It manages breath and digestion and balances our neurochemicals. Paradoxically, our nervous system is also malleable. Through a strong commitment generated by the mind, tied to a deeper, existential understanding of our purpose, we guide our nervous system to heightened capabilities.

When we work with our nervous system, we have the resources to help us and others not only survive but thrive – just like the trees. We have the power to guide our internal and external systems to respond consciously. It is time to step up to take accountability for our impact.

Center

Center is a term used to refer to an actual point two inches below the belly button. It is also a term used to reference a state of mind. These two references are connected. When you need to get out of homeostasis and choose your response, you center. You place your attention on your gut and your breath. When you do this, you bring yourself into the present moment. You pause homeostasis and create a space between stimulus and response[11].

Breath is important here. When you notice the rise and fall of your chest or gut over a period of five breaths or more, it changes the signals sent to your heart – a powerful mood influencer. The arrhythmia of your heart shifts through the breath’s connection with the vagus nerve[12]. This is the physiological reason breath is important. It literally has the power to change the signals your heart sends to your brain. It reduces the amount of time you are triggered. It slows your reactivity. It expands how and what you think. Breath changes the story formed in your mind.

When you center, you anchor in what is happening right now. You gain the ability to take in new data. You remember your commitment. This changes the data your brain selects and uses to predict and manifest your actions, thoughts, and mood. Therefore, it changes the outcome of the experience. You create your own reality. The reality you want to see.

When you center, you are accountable to a new future that has deep meaning to you. It is connected to your deeper purpose for being. It reminds you why you choose to take big risks.

Center is what some people find when they meditate. Center happens anytime you bring your attention to your body. And if you practice, center changes and deepens over time. If you find it when you meditate, try to meditate in a meeting with your eyes open or in the grocery line.

This gives you data. Your experience versus your story of your experience. You begin to separate yourself from the stimulus. You gain new capacity to see your window of tolerance in action.

We are not taught to center. When you pay attention to your breath, you impact your body’s ability to modulate your reaction and find space between stimulus and response. When you center, you become aware and accountable for your reactions. You increase your chances for new action and the likelihood of a positive impact on the people around you.

In the 1980’s and 90’s, Italian research scientists discovered mirror neurons[13]. Neurons in our brain pick up on emotionally significant responses from other people and set in motion a corresponding action in our body. When you react to events that are emotionally significant – like in an emergency, the systems of other people pick this up and react and respond accordingly. It is part of our limbic system that tunes into others to manage the need for safety. In high-risk situations, if you do not know this is happening, you can inadvertently create more drama than you want.

Center helps us choose our impact. It lets us be responsible for our actions in a congruent way. Centering builds trust.

The first step to center is to notice your breath. Our lungs change shape when we inhale and exhale. This major organ oxygenates our circulatory system. Our lungs are like balloons that expand and contract at regular intervals. They provide an entrainment[14] – a synchronized rhythm – that impacts the whole body system.

The lungs also massage the heart. Nestled in between the lungs, when you take a deep breath, your heart gets a snuggle.

During a deep breath, your heart rate speeds up a little. When you release the breath your heart rate slows down. The bigger the difference between your inhalation and exhalation heart rate the higher your vagal tone. The higher your vagal tone, the more easily you recover from stress.[15]

Your vagal tone was discovered by Steven Porges[16] and his research team – I include the research team as we all stand on the back of those who have come before us. They realized much like the brain and nervous system, that the vagus nerve also evolved in layers.

The vagus nerve is a cranial nerve that enervates your viscera, facial expressions, voice box, and other responses. Porges and his research team discovered three layers. These three layers govern different functions: immobilization – a freeze response, mobilization – a fight or flee response, and social connection – our appease response.

When we are unaware of our breath, our vagal tone continues as we have practiced. When we wake up our observer and bring our attention to the breath, we can change the vagal tone, our affect on others, and we gain choice in our response.

With a woke observer, you see your patterns of action, thought, and mood that before lived under your level of consciousness. You notice when you are off. To add to breath, there are skills of the mind that help us understand how to move toward somatically managing risk in a relationship.

Our Story

Our mind creates our personal narrative – how we think about ourselves and others. The narrative is activated through our sensations. We feel, see, hear, a word, action, or emotion and a story pops into our mind: a storyline about us or other people.

This happens unconsciously. It is our brain’s role to take data from inside and outside us and rapidly categorize the data and make meaning. This narrative runs in the background of our daily lives. It drives how we meet our three basic needs to thrive: safety, connection, and dignity. These inform everything we do and how we perceive the impact of our thoughts and actions. This narrative is what we have been taught to believe. It is our habit pattern of thought. It is not the truth. It is our truth.

In our complex world, thinking we know the truth provides an extreme challenge. Increasing our communication skills and creating new outputs that make things happen faster and more smoothly takes more than our current truth allows. To understand and grapple with multiple truths is required. And we rarely learn how to do that skillfully.

The first step is to understand how your story was created. From center, we enter this inquiry. Center provides a space between stimulus – thinking about our story, and response – the reaction to parts of our story not being true.

When you understand that your story is not the story, you are curious in a new way. What is the truth? If my mind and body are not free, how do I free them? You use your body to center yourself and then question your story.

Our sensations drive a narrative. This narrative determines our choices. We make choices that have historically kept us safe, connected, and valued. When you step out of your narrative and into a bigger story it is destabilizing. You become uncomfortable. It feels difficult. We question who we are and why we are here. The questions set you on the path toward your ecological niche[17] – your individual way of contributing to the larger world. The path begins by taking intra- and inter-personal risks.

You learn about your narrative when you reflect on experiences and people, and converse with others. You see how your sensations drive your story. As you open to this fact, you disrupt long-held beliefs. Initially, this is unsettling. You disrupt homeostasis. As you practice stepping out of your story, the disruption becomes more common and less destabilizing. You realize that disruption in a relationship happens. And it takes longer to recover when you are unconsciously stuck in your story.

The systems that surround us from birth, our life experiences, and the behaviors and beliefs of our family system influence our story. These are fundamental to who we are. When we question our story, we rock our ego.

The ego is the image we form of our self. It helps us know where we begin and end. It allows us to differentiate from others. It is the keeper of our story.

Ego development goes through phases[18]. The ego helps us know what we believe and take action. A healthy ego is balanced with our soul’s purpose[19] – the deep ecological niche we are here to serve.

When we marry our ecological purpose with our ego, we stand our ground, and unsettling interpersonal disruption becomes easier to navigate. We know where we stand. We have examined and continue to examine our story. We see other people as individuals examining their story as well, instead of someone trying to take us off our game.

Say you have a conversation with a colleague about an upcoming trip or project. You hope – and often assume – you are on the same page. There is a short time between this trip/project and the next. Most of your trips/projects have been interpersonally easy. You assume this will be as well.

Then, your psycho-neurbiology picks up a sensation. This sensation generates an automatic story that something is off. Your automatic protection mechanisms are activated. You begin to associate how this experience will play out from your deep memory. You activate skills to navigate the challenge.

You use your communication skills and mode of connection to discover more. You may go away and seek counsel about this person or idea. Maybe you confront them directly. Or you appease them and try to connect with them to gain more information. These are our three basic moves to settle our disruption: move away, against, or toward.

You still feel a rift. Your body relies on your stories as your resource. You decide checking in would be a bad idea. Maybe you have seen them react before and don’t want to elicit or deal with that response. You are not sure what to say. You begin to prepare for the trip or project with this felt sense of dis-ease.

You come about your method of resolution honestly. Most people are never taught how to enter and navigate these conversations. Under stress, you revert to your baseline skills.

As we infrequently reflect on our narrative, and how we navigate interpersonal conversations and situations, and rarely have a safe place to practice new skills, our skill level and choices remain stagnant. We continue to hope for a change but often reproduce the same results. Or surprisingly, get new results but have no idea how we did it and are unable to recreate the positive results.

At this point, all tied up in your stories about yourself and the other person, you operate at an interpersonal deficit. Then, you add risk.

It is easy to see how you become reactive. Not only are your basic needs to thrive at risk, but the very foundation on which you have built your life is threatened. No wonder we react when interpersonal relationships are difficult!

At this point, you breathe. You re-center in your purpose and commitment. You remember you are reacting. This person is also stuck in their story. You become curious about yourself and the other. You center. You observe how you respond to them. You seek a trusted advisor for counsel. Then you enter the conversation, centered and grounded.

Center religiously during the discomfort. Your system will cut off your neocortical capability and revert to your “engrained habits.” When you lose this connection – the neurochemical cycle usually lasts about 90 minutes – your system relies on your habit patterns of action to respond to the situation. When you center, you interrupt your habit patterns. In this space between stimulus and response, you have a choice.

Historically, our automatic responses were a survival advantage. In the early millennia of our species, we needed to make snap judgments about safety to stay alive, connection to know who to affiliate with, and the pecking order to appropriately contribute to the survival of our tribe. Our snap judgments are still useful. These help us know when something is off. The way we manage our judgments is outdated.[20]

There is more data both inside and outside of us that illuminates our judgment. When we center, we learn how to access and frame the data. This anchoring of data grounds our judgment. When we center, we calm our neurobiology. This helps others become less reactive. When we center, and question our story, we help create the most optimal result to thrive.

To manage risk somatically, we

• understand the world we see is generated from sensation and our deep memory, and those drive our thoughts, emotions, and action;
• center and find the space between stimulus and response, and
• question our story.

The Way Forward

The body doesn’t lie. A new way to manage risk is possible when you utilize the capacity of your body and change your story.

A sensation is a sensation. Your automatic unconscious patterns interpret these sensations, make meaning of them, and then act. If you are unaware of this habit pattern of action, you believe what you experience is true. It is true for you, but it is not the truth.

When you name a sensation as a fact and work to reinterpret the sensation, you rewrite your story and find the truer truth.

This process weaves a neural safety net for your benefit and others. The safety net is woven of your resources and skills, and your new story through your conscious commitment to truth on your path toward your ecological niche.

To manage risk through somatic practices, you start at the beginning – your sensations. These are the baselines for grounded truth.

• Name the sensations in the body: location, pressure, temperature, and movement.
• Breathe and center.
• Feel how your body responds to the sensation.
• Notice how you interpret what you feel and experience.
• Anchor in the present: where am I, who am I with, what data do I want to gather, and what is my commitment?

Then, examine your story.

• What do I believe about this person, situation, or experience?
• How do I contribute to this output?
• Make space for your story.
• Question your assumptions.
• Take in new data.
• Connect to a broader story.

Somatically managing risk creates flexibility and choice. It allows all people to fill their needs of safety, connection, and dignity with confidence. A system thrives when all feel safe, a sense of belonging, and an ability to contribute and be valued by the larger whole. Somatically managing risk helps people thrive.

The path is not easy. Reactivity is likely. But the more you practice from center, the more chance you will keep yourself and others calm and connected in risky situations.

Humans are tasked to come together in unprecedented and risky ways. The foundation of connection I suggest is different from the transactional connection we learn. The knowledge lives within, not outside of you. You build your net of safety from the exploration of your ecological niche and your own experience.

There is overwhelming pressure to do good work. Crisis creates pressure and inspires innovative action. The visceral crisis to shift your practices exists in your own body. Use the interpersonal crisis you encounter to trust yourself from the inside out and begin the path toward a generative way to manage risk now and in the future.

[1] Fogel, A. (2009). The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2907136/

[3]Siegel, D. (2010). Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2016/sep/05/change-blindness-can-you-spot-the-difference

[5] Vance, E. (2016). The Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic.

[6] Blake, A. (2018). Your Body is Your Brain. CA: Trokay Press.

[7] Blake, A. Body = Brain course. www.embright.org.

[8] Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

[9] LaChapelle, D. (1988). Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life. CO: Finn Hill Arts. 

[10] Wohlleben, P. (2016). The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel and How they Communicate. Vancouver, BC: Greystone Books.

[11] Frankl, V. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. Vienna, Austria.

[12] Porges, S. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagal_tone and see Porges, S..

[16] Porges, S. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

[17] Plotkin, B. (2007). Nature and the Human Soul. New York, NY: New World Library.

[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loevinger%27s_stages_of_ego_development

[19] Plotkin, B. (2003). Soulcraft. New York, NY: New World Library.

[20] Brown, A.M. (2017). Emergent Strategies. Chico, CA: AK Press.

The Ten Essentials of Leading

As a leader, especially one transitioning from a manager of a group or team to a leader of a department or organization, there are ten essentials to create and maintain to succeed in your new role.

The way you execute these ten essentials will be unique to each leader. As we have seen in many organizations, systems, businesses, NGOs, and non-profits around the globe, if you are not tending these ten things, your organization will be wobbly – and not like a Weeble. Your people and organization will be uncertain, unclear, and less effective in ways you will not know until it is too late.

Number One: Vision.

Have a long-term vision, even if you can only see into the next six months. Know where you want to go, and what skills you want to build, define what would be the best contribution of your role in the company, and ask your boss or board to define the one or two big rocks to move this quarter, year, or term. Have each team member create their own visions and share in a meeting specifically designed for people to share their visions, not as a sidebar or fit into another slot.

Number Two: Safety.

Psychological safety is critical to any organization. While it is not your role to ensure the psychological safety of everyone in your organization, it is essential you have thought about safety, what it means to you, what you will adhere to as illustrated in your vision, and how you will work with unsafe behaviors. Safety builds trust. Unsafe can be felt and seen. People don’t usually share when they feel unsafe, some often don’t know why. It is your job to notice, inquire, and set standards for what it means to uphold safe behaviors.

Number Three: Role.

Remember you are not the role. I will say this again. You are not the role. You are the person in the role. You are replaceable. Your role is maybe not. Many people tie up their personal identity with the role they play in an organization. Though there may be similarities to who you are and the role you play – you may need to be organized for your role and you may already be an organized person, you are not the only organized person that can fill the role. Given your personality and inclinations, you must still perform the role. Regardless of whether you are a driver and lead from the front or a servant leader and lead from behind, you still have a role to play and often you must build the skills to lead outside the comfort zone of your identity to fill the needs of the role.

Numer Four: Financial Hygiene.

Know your financials. They are your responsibility. If your financials are off, you must focus, uncover why, and hire the people to help you right the ship. You need your teams and their teams’ financials to roll up to yours. Financial reporting must be standardized and understandable to the entire group and those hierarchically above you. Your financial decisions must match the organizational culture. If you work at a non-profit organization but have spent much of your career working in for-profit companies, you must assess what you think is necessary to align with the organization’s needs or principles. Or you must craft and share the story that accounts for any discrepancy.

Number Five: ROB (Rhythm of Business).

Plan and track all the events, reporting, culture needs, and financial duties down to the day, week, or time of year they are due. Use this calendar to plan your year. If your budget is due in December, put a meeting on the ROB for budget review in March, June, and October with a few more in November to refine and review the budget before you share it with others. Your Rhythm of Business (ROB) does not have to look like anyone else’s. And, you must have one. Even if you are not a planner and think the ROB is constraining, you and more importantly your people need an ROB to follow and plan the scope of their work.

Number Six: Meetings.

Think about and plan meetings. In most organizations, people put the meeting on the calendar and then show up on the day of the meeting – whether it is a weekly staff meeting or a quarterly all-hands – and ask what are we talking about today. If you are lucky, someone populates the agenda for you. These agendas are often task completion checklists and lack vision and energy.  Every meeting you have in your organization drives culture, connection, disconnection, clarity, or confusion. If you want to have a stellar culture, go out of your comfort zone to design, and plan exceptional meetings. Exceptional meetings do not have to cost money, though you must spend time designing them. What we see time and again, the more personal risk you take to create something engaging and unusual but effective, the more likely the meeting will deliver more than hoped-for results.  

Number Seven: Agendas.

As I said above, the ROB often drives the tasks on most agendas. The budget will be discussed at the budget meeting. Staff meeting is for pressing or emerging issues on the team or in the organization. Your job with agendas is reflection. Your agenda items drive the conversation. Whenever is a good time for you to think, take a moment, make a cup of tea or coffee, and jot down your highlights, your concerns, your hopes, and questions for the team members. What conversations do you want or need to have? Share your thoughts on the agenda before your meeting and then structure the meeting in a way that opens up the conversation.

Number Eight: Feedback.

People cannot grow with once- or twice-a-year feedback. Feedback is essential in every organization. It is also the most feared or joked-about process. You may be a person who thrives on any kind of feedback. Or you may disdain giving or receiving feedback. Regardless, it is your role – whether you like it or not – to pay attention and offer people actionable, in-the-moment feedback that helps them grow. Build feedback culture into your vision. Standardize and drive the type and method of feedback you wish to receive and what you will provide for others. A common feedback language or formula is essential to create a culture of safety. Build feedback into your meetings. You, the leader, need to show and teach how to deliver optimal feedback to drive the bottom line and toward your vision.

Number Nine: 1-on-1’s, 2-on-1’s, 3-on-1″s.

Relationships are the key to any successful venture. We have seen many people neglect to meet one-on-one with their team to preserve their precious time. Others put off meeting one-on-one because they have a conflict stirring and are not sure how to manage the disruption. Waiting creates churn. Waiting deepens the gulf in a relationship. Maintaining 1:1’s with your team and those you wish to influence is critical to building trust. Have a standing agenda for these meetings and then leave space for open dialogue. Standing items might be feedback, financials, team challenges, or anything else critical to their role’s ability to accomplish the work. When needed, schedule two-on-ones or three-on-ones. Invite members of the team who have disagreements, need a conversation, or have alternate data. This brings people into the same “room,” offers a third party for psychological safety, and helps eliminate confusion and misalignment.

Number Ten: Reviews.

Construct a method of offering mini-reviews throughout the year. This way the formal review will not come as a surprise or be feared. Do not wait for the six-month or annual process. Maintain a OneNote or another tracking method with data about your people. Write actions and words you observe in 1:1’s, in team meetings, or in email when the person is on or off track with their goals or vision. If you hear feedback through the grapevine, ASK if you can share what you heard with your person or team – we call this positive gossip. Publicly note review dates on your ROB. Ask people to review you. Tell them what skills you hope to build this year and what feedback you might like to receive. Ask them what skills they are building and what feedback they would like to receive. Make reviews engaging by reflecting before the meeting to be prepared and not waste people’s time.

Conclusion

You are paid to lead your organization. This is your role. You have deliverables and those are important. The way you go about delivering is as important as the result. In the heat of delivery, we often forget that people function best when treated as humans, not roles. If you establish patterns to engage your team before delivery crunches, you deposit money in the emotional bank account that pays dividends later. May you be successful. Invite perspective if you need support.

RHYTHM OF ACTION

IDENTIFY 

The Rhythm of Action is a cyclical process that details and names the phases of a project’s life cycle. “[The rhythm of action] process and structure guides people to observe commitments and listen for concerns,” says Peter Denning a distinguished professor at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, CA.  

The Rhythm of Action was created by Fernando Flores – a Chilean organizational development consultant. The model below combines both the Rhythm of Action by Flores and the Rhythm of Energy by Richard Strozzi-Heckler at the Strozzi Institute. The latter part notes that all beings and systems follow a cyclical life cycle – like seasons, the cycle of a day, or the cycle of life – the last example not necessarily renewing depending on what you believe, but ideas, beliefs, practices, and DNA live on through others.

The Rhythm of Action or RoA provides a full-bodied and systemic view of the totality and thoroughness of a process, event, or project. There is a cycle. You may only be one part of the cycle, but the cycle does complete and begin. There is a central part of the cycle where people refine and build on what was imagined.

In organizations, the beginning, middle, and end are often disparate – we aren’t informed about the end-to-end process, or we fail to notice or don’t learn about the continuous refining that happens in the middle.

Flores designed the process to create a common language to track and speak about the levels and diverse sets of commitments within an organization. He is quoted as saying, “An organization exists to fulfill commitments and people are hired to help the organization fulfill these commitments.” The RoA process provides a visual aid and common language to discuss how to structure a process when it begins, where to look for missed details when we encounter challenges, and what to do once we end or begin a phase.

The yellow center of the Rhythm of Action contains the Conditions of Satisfaction – the details of this space identify how and when a project is complete. Conditions of Satisfaction or CoS are difficult to define as projects change scope or are deprioritized. Since no one wants to waste time, people and teams enter projects that are not fully detailed. This happens due to biases like the Illusory Superiority bias, the Optimism bias, or the Dunning-Kruger effect. To sum up, these biases say we underestimate the complexity required to complete a task and overestimate our ability to complete the task without too many details.

To determine your CoS, you complete phases one and two or the RoA. Phase one is the awakening or preparation phase. It is when we have an idea and begin to flesh it out. We detail the complexity of the project, the competency and capacity of our organization or team, and our beginning set of CoS’s.

We then enter negotiations with our team members, other organizations, the business, or the client. This negotiation phase increases the amount of energy we put into the project. We involve more people, clearly define the scope, build context and support, determine resources, and finalize costs.

In the negotiation phase, an often-neglected part is the accept or decline of the project or CoS’s and by-whens. Most organizations have the counteroffer down. It sounds like, “If you want us to do that, we must change the scope or increase the budget.” Commit-to-commit sounds like, “If we like the project, we will fully fund the resources.”

Without the ability to say a full-stop no or a full-bodied yes, you run the risk of being wishy-washy especially when you involve more than yourself in the completion of the project. You may be full on yes, but then the project stalls or is confusing and your reputation is on the line. You may blame other people, departments, or the business. The HIGH likelihood is that you did not do the incredibly difficult and scary work to agree on a clear and complete list of the CoS’s and by-whens and did not enter the accept and decline process with anyone but yourself and the client.

People do not explicitly accept or decline because they can’t because there is something missing, won’t because they are unwilling to do the hard work of countless conversations, or don’t because they literally do not know how. This is often a result of a NOT fully fleshed-out CoS. Sometimes people are born with an automatic yes or no or are conditioned to not say no or to say yes regardless of if they can or cannot complete the project. If you sense this is you, reach out. There are practices and inquiries that will cure you of this challenge.

Mostly a clear yes or no is not possible because creating a comprehensive list of CoS’s takes time and energy. More time and energy than most people have or want to spend in their day. Unconsciously, people prefer to get started. The culture of your business or organization comes into play as do personal biases and proclivities. Pushing off the yes or no leads to more time spent in the performance or containment phase trying to determine what went wrong.  

The performance phase is where you accept responsibility for your commitment to complete the project. In this phase, you contain. You draw in all your resources and focus on moving toward completion. You have a complete list of CoS and by-whens, or at least as comprehensive as you can. Often, at the pace of business today, there are often unknowns and you must move forward without being clear. Scope changes. Projects get defunded or deprioritized. You do your best and leave no stone unturned. And, what you often find under one stone, or another is something you did not plan for. This is when you renegotiate, report a breakdown (also called escalation), revoke your promise or commitment, or reconfigure your CoS. During the performance phase, you create and share your workback plan to fulfill the commitment made by you, the team, or the organization.

When you hit your Cos’s and by-whens, you declare satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with those involved and that the project is complete. This is the last phase. If you declare – state aloud for all to hear – dissatisfaction, you return again to the negotiation phase and become clearer about your accepts and declines (yes’s and no’s).

In completion, this is where you assess performance. This can look like creating a retrospective that involves all people – clients, the business, partners, and all involved in the project. It is also where you assess individuals. In my opinion, assessing performance at every phase creates a more robust process, project, fulfilled partners, skilled staff, and less work at the end. And assessing performance takes courage, time, and practice. It also simply requires you to structure assessments during the process.  

Knowledge of this process creates the ability to account for yourself, your team, and your organization in a way where you do not have to fake it or cover things up. It also requires that you build the skills to fully say no and yes and then work through the discomfort to determine a clear and achievable plan.

NOTICE 

The rhythm of action happens everywhere. At work, notice when you or others make a request – when people ask for things. Most people are not clear in their ask. We either think people should or assume they know what we mean. Or we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings or ask for too much. Or we don’t want to overload them. This means you are asking for people to over-function for you or are over-functioning for them. Over-functioning or under-functioning is a co-created pattern that impacts your clarity and ability to account for your and others’ behaviors. If you engage in the over or under-functioning practice, reach out, it’s a habit that at some point begins to erode trust and confidence in your work.

Notice how you feel about inquiring more deeply into the request. If this feels uncomfortable – like you don’t want to bother someone or you think you should know – it is likely a good time to pull out the mush separator to share thoughts, needs, and feelings to confirm the request. 

Notice when you make a promise. Start with simple requests – will you get this detail for me, will you check on that, or can you do this by noon.  Notice what it feels like to honor a request made by another or when someone honors yours. Allow this experience – I or others honor requests – to support the story that you receive help when you ask.  

Notice when you want to decline a request. The decline often begins with a sensation. You know something is not right about saying yes. This is a good time to explore the CoS of the request. Also, get out your feelings and needs cards. Notice what you feel and what you need. There are important clues to gather data for and build the strength of your decline.   

Notice which phase is the most compelling to you or the most difficult. Most people have a sweet spot or two that connect where they have an aptitude or a preference. If other people in your group have ones that are different you may be well balanced. 

Different areas of strength also cause conflict. I want to come up with and start new ideas – awaken and increase, while my colleague wants to linger to make them perfect – increase and contain. When you know your areas of strength and preference, conflict is more easily resolved. It makes conflict more objective – we both have different ideas of how to work through a project, than subjective – they are wrong in how they work.   

If many in your group have the same aptitude, then you may need to pay extra attention to the underrepresented areas. There could be a group that loves to start new projects. Yet they could lack the ability to complete them. If many of these people work together, there could be incompletion in many places. This is a good time to offer an assessment to the group. “I see this group has five projects in process, but none are complete.” Then inquire about their method for completion.  

EXPLORE 

Before you make a request, detail your conditions of satisfaction. Explore what need this request will fill and how that fits into the larger mission of the organization.  

When you enter a project, explore what phase the project is in. Explore what areas move smoothly and what areas need clarity. Inquire if people have the skills and capacity they need to complete the project.  

Explore what each phase feels like to you. Note when you move from one phase to another.  

Explore the phase strengths of each person on your team. Explain the Rhythm of Action to them. Help them learn how to note CoS. Inquire what they believe to be their strength.  

Explore how the phases of your project interface at different places with other projects. Start to see commitments, concerns, and rhythms in more than your own work. 

APPLY  

Paraphrase any and all requests. Make yourself and others uncomfortable with the details of your questions. This will save time and complications later. Get clear about your request or decline and make an offer or a counteroffer. 

Detail your conditions of satisfaction. Make sure to name your relational and technical expectations. 

Stay longer in the negotiation phase. Hang out in the discomfort of being curious about details. Risk upsetting the other person in service of being clear. Remember and share your purpose – to complete the project and declare satisfaction.   

Decline, counteroffer, commit-to-commit to a request that is not robust. Stay in the conversation until you have a clear yes or no.  

Have conversations as you move toward completion about challenges you encounter along the way. Give status updates to stakeholders involved in the project. Schedule retrospectives at each phase. Make assessments of people, processes, structures, and outcomes, and declare satisfaction or dissatisfaction frequently – don’t wait until completion!

Decline to accept work that is incomplete. Give people an assessment of their work if it is not what you agreed upon.  

Celebrate completion. Offer feedback about how the project process satisfied you. 

If you want support, invite perspective. We can support you to increase the discomfort in service of clarity and a solid reputation.

Mindful Leadership – Generate Understanding

Client Story

Prentice was upset with her boss. Earlier in the year, she received a promotion and was now on the leadership team. In email, her boss Sarah asked her to participate in an interview for someone to hierarchically sit in between them.

The promotion had felt rewarding to Prentice. She could be on the leadership team and drive necessary changes in the system and with the work. Others told her they were glad to have her as an advocate at that level. They appreciated her calm and diplomatic way of handling complex situations. She could feel the impact of her contribution to the work and the people’s happiness in a new way.

The interview invitation caught Prentice off guard. She was confused and angry – though no one could tell as she had a history of suppressing her feelings. Prentice could not understand why the boss needed to hire a position in between them. The anger she felt confused her. The situation overwhelmed her. She did not want to interview this person. People that reported to her were shocked and expressed their discontent with this decision. People advised her to get out as she was likely being pushed out.

When we talked, Prentice was distraught. She was mixed up and needed help to decipher her opinions, feelings, and other people’s judgments and suggestions.

Prentice wanted to talk to her boss about the situation. She was practiced enough to know this was an important conversation and she needed help. She knew her feelings were critical to name and share. She also knew her boss liked factual data – not feelings. Was there a skillful way to share how she felt?

This type of event – what I call a rug pull, when you think one thing is going to happen yet something altogether different occurs – had been occurring since Prentice and her boss began working together. We like to say, once is an incident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern. This rug pull behavior was a pattern.

During these types of experiences where we are caught off guard or blindsided, the incident breaks open the flood gates of sensation and memory. Every other incident with this person or back through time that resembles these sensations comes flowing into your body and mind. You literally become flooded with waves of memory and sensation.

Prentice felt this overwhelm. Prentice was uncertain where to begin. When we met, I suggested we use a tool we call the mush separator to deconstruct the experience.

The mush is the combination of sensory data, thoughts, feeling, wants, and desired actions that arise as overwhelm. These categories separate the mush into distinct buckets to learn from, sort out what is most relevant to share, generate understanding, and quell the flood.

Identify

The Mush Separator creates a space between stimulus – the event, and response – your reaction. It helps you slow down to understand your experience then provides a structure to share it with others.

The phrase creating space between stimulus and response is often attributed to Viktor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning as well as to Stephen Covey – who denies saying it. It is a sentiment of many who study and apply behavioral science. If you learn to create a space between the event and your reaction, you gain not simply space in the moment but a competency to resolve any challenge you encounter in the future.

Our version of this tool combines the Awareness Wheel created by Sherod Miller, Phyllis Miller, Elam Nunnally, and Daniel Wackman in their book called Talking and Listening Together (1991) with the term Mush from another version of the awareness wheel in the book Clear Leadership (2009) by Gervais Bush.

We felt the awareness wheel, though circular in nature like conversation, needed to be augmented for business conversations. We wanted to illustrate a clear process from start to finish. We also wanted to separate the areas where people become confused. If there is confusion, there is mush.

The model is made of five parts. Each element of your experience to the event is separated in service of learning. This process slows down your mind and highlights the parts vital to clarity. It also provides a shareable visual and explicit conversational structure to follow which – when shared as a resource – settles the nervous systems of everyone involved – people know where you are going and how to listen to what is said. This creates fewer misinterpretations.

Each element requires the foundational skill of self-awareness. To consciously move through any conversation, you become the observer of your actions, feelings, impact, and intentions. This provides needed perspective and generates empathy – when we empathize with ourselves, it makes it easier to do with others.

The first element is the awareness of and ability to identify sensory data. Sensory data is what you perceive with your eyes, ears, and through the written word. Sensory data also includes touch, smell, and taste – though less relevant in most people’s business life.

Your sensations prompt action. A person shrugs, nods their head, sighs, shows up late, does something repeatedly that drives you crazy, or shares their judgment of you, and you consciously or unconsciously react. No reaction or numbness is a response.

Using the mush separator before you respond drives clarity about the sensory data facts you reacted to.

A fact is something another person could validate or video camera or a microphone would pick up – actions, sounds, or words. It can be a behavior that repeats over time such as lateness or interruptions. It can be a sigh or scoff. It can also be a sensation inside of yourself – like Prentice’s internal experience of anger. These are factual data points that can be verified by others or a way to self-disclose something about your internal state.

Beginning a conversation with data points allows the other person to see or remember the situation. It brings them back into the moment where the mush began. This is called grounding back in the moment.

In Prentice’s example, some facts are:

• Her boss gave her a promotion, invited her to join an interview, and stated she was planning to hire a manager in between their positions. These are facts verifiable by the boss or others.
• Prentice felt unsettled in her stomach and heat in her chest. These are facts for her yet unverifiable outside of her body – and still important to name even if just in her mind.
  • Naming sensory data anchors you in your body and grounds you in the present moment. This tactic allows you full access to your set of skills and tools.  
• If relevant, and with permission from her peers, she could also name their comments that, “she should start looking for a new job” and “this was wrong.”

Without the mush separator, Prentice might have begun the conversation with an opinion, feeling, intention, or action.

• Opinion: “I don’t think you have thought through hiring someone in between us.”
• Feeling (not): “I feel that you do not understand my value.” (This is not a feeling but a thought – more about that later.)
• Intention: “My intention was to be the bridge and now I can’t do that.”
• Action: “I will not join you for this interview.”

People do not hear whatever comes after these statements. If the statement is reactive, they will enter a reactive state themselves. Reaction is your bodies autonomic systems mirror neurons at work. Reactivity generates a threat response. In this state, people will undermine, dismiss, or work to eliminate any threat through:

• defending their position – “This position is necessary because…”
• cutting off or checking out – “You have no say in this decision.” or “We’ll carry on without you.”
• appeasing the other person – “I’m so sorry you feel that way how can I make you feel better?”

It takes a lot of practice to hear a judgment that relates to you and not react. To then pause to breakdown the accusation is nearly impossible without practice. Most people instantaneously and unconsciously defend without awareness or understanding the impact of their action. Often subconsciously they feel hurt, vindicated in their defense, and instantly justify the response. This is what your system has practiced for generations – survival. Only in interpersonal dialogue survival is not the goal. The goal is understanding.

To begin a conversation that leads to understanding, the best place to start is with sensory data.

Sharing sensory data of the experience creates a connection.

Prentice: “You asked me to sit in an interview with you and the person you want to hire as my boss.”

Boss: “Yes.”

Prentice: “This is the first I have heard that you want to create a position in between me and you.”

Boss: “Yes.”

With this data, you anchored them in the experience where the misunderstanding occurred. You are not judging them, saying anything is wrong, or interpreting their intention. You are simply stating facts.

Gathering sensory data is a difficult task. Most people gather data to support their point of view. My clients often share data like, “You asked me to sit in on the interview to – derail me, take away my power, belittle me, etc.” This is data up front with some judgment at the back – like a bad mullet.

Take a minute to read the exchange between Prentice and her boss above. Speak it out loud. Then repeat the following: “you asked me to sit in on an interview to derail me.”

Notice which statement feels better or worse. What happens in your body?

Words have impact. Words laced with judgment generate a reaction. This leads to more mush and less understanding.

To capture sensory data, you need to practice. Our brains are pattern detection organs. You sense something and unconsciously respond from your deep memory[1]. To consciously response, you become crystal clear about the data.

For practice, I ask clients to take notes on sensory data in meetings we both attend. In our one-on-one’s, we go through the “data” and identify what is actual data and what is a thought masquerading as data.

When you become well-practiced at capturing sensory data, the people you converse with can say “yes,” to your data, like with Prentice’s example above. This is the first step of this five-part model. This being one of the hardest to master.

Thoughts unanchored in data are dangerous. In any conversation that you are unprepared for, become reactive, or are caught off guard with, your thoughts, feelings, and hopes become scrambled. This mush comes out as a judgment, opinion, criticism, defensiveness, anger, cut-off, or your unique reaction.

You speak your thoughts which are woven with feelings. You speak feelings that are really thoughts. And you rarely speak about your deeper hope as you feel vulnerable and off center.

The mush is the yellow center of the model. It is comprised of your thoughts, feelings, and intentions.

Your thoughts are the meaning you make of the sensory data. Thoughts are your judgements, opinions, beliefs, assumptions, assessments, expectations, conclusions, interpretations, and guesses. Thoughts are how you interpret the sensory data and the impact that data has on you.

Your thoughts reveal the filters through which you interpret people and experiences. As you become aware of how you interpret sensory data, you build the skill of awareness – the ability to perceive yourself and others more objectively.

Your thoughts are YOUR truth. They are not THE truth. This is often where we become confused and reactive. As a listener of your or another’s thoughts, it is important to remember you are listening to a truth, not THE truth.

Instantaneous judgments are hard wired in our brain. This wiring has enabled our survival as a species. Though helpful to deciphering and responding to threats in the natural environment, these quick judgments do not serve us in conversations. They create more mush.

There is always a truth in every judgment. We react to the thread of truth and then shoot the messenger. To respond instead of react, takes and enormous amount of vulnerability. You listen and separate the truth from someone else’s judgment. To do this, catch their words off to the side, don’t swallow them whole. This allows you to spaciously examine another’s thoughts to decipher the nugget of truth that relates to you and discard the judgments.

As Prentice and I mind mapped her challenge through the mush separator, she could name how her boss has been blindsiding her for years. She could also name what might happen in the future if the change occurred.

None of these thoughts are wrong, they are simply ungrounded. Unanchored thoughts generate reactivity. Prentice’s thoughts unanchored in facts or feelings could be from the past, present, or future – or all places at once.

Generating these thoughts unanchored in data creates an air of truth about them. We become emboldened, believing your side of the story is right.

Sometimes righteousness is necessary to create the resolve to share your thoughts. Ungrounded righteousness limits openness and decreases understanding.

Without practice, it is hard to anchor thoughts in data and create understanding. With clients, I rarely spend time on ungrounded thoughts. I connect thoughts to sensory data and feelings.

Feelings are a hard-wired mammalian birthright. Humans evolved to feel. It is a species survival mechanism. Even if you don’t think you have feelings, or work is not the place for feelings, you have them, and they are unconsciously more present than you know or care to admit you.

Feelings are your emotional response to your thoughts and the sensory data. Feelings help you identify what is important to you and weave meaning into your thoughts and hopes.

There is a statement, “have your feelings or they will have you!” When you move from stimulus to response habitually, you unwittingly ignore and minimize your hopes and feelings. When you ignore your feelings, they gain a life of their own. They often overwhelm or scare you with their volume and mass. They simply want your attention. When you name them – “I feel sad.” – you acknowledge the feeling and release the internal pressure that builds from unspoken or suppressed feelings.

Prentice had a habit of suppressing her feelings. This is a common skill business of many professionals. This skill is useful in low stakes conversations. It becomes a liability when you decide to take a stand.

In our mush separator process, and in service of learning, we limit people to four feelings: mad, sad, glad, or afraid. It is possible – and common – to have all four feelings for multiple reasons from one experience.

To begin, feelings are purposely limited. The limitation pushes you to choose a simple and clear word for your often complex emotions.

In practice, most clients dislike saying words like mad or afraid. They want to say they are a little frustrated or concerned instead. Your internal self knows when you belittle or soften your feelings. The action you take corresponds to the feeling you name.

If you say you’re a little frustrated, people will respond as if you are a little frustrated. This is often unsatisfying to you as you are actually mad. If you say you are mad, people will respond in turn and likely take you more seriously. This clarity draws attention to you. The attention invites you into a vulnerable conversation.

As Brené Brown says, “Clear is Kind.” Clarity inside yourself and with others creates and invites a vulnerable conversation. Vulnerable conversations are rare and therefore usually unpracticed. Unpracticed vulnerability often feels like you are defenseless. You cannot retain your rightness and be vulnerable. You must admit that there is truth in both sides. Unpracticed vulnerability and the uncertainty it generates is why most people are habitually vague.

As you practice, you become comfortable with uncertainty and vulnerability, which you realize are actually not so bad because the outcomes they produce are WAY more satisfying than the conversations before. At this point, you graduate to other feeling words.

A common pitfall people encounter with feelings is thinking they are sharing a feeling when they are really sharing a thought. “I feel mad.” is a feeling statement. “I feel THAT you are making me mad.” is a thought.

To practice sharing how you feel, recognize that feeling sentences are short, “I feel mad [sad, glad, afraid].” If you say, “I feel THAT…” or “I feel LIKE…” you disguise thoughts as feelings.

In conversations, feeling statements often comes amidst or hidden within thoughts which makes feelings hard to distinguish and thus subject to wild interpretations.

In working with clients, I adopted the following formula:

• I feel [mad, sad, glad, or afraid] that [add thoughts here: you are, it is, we chose…].

I encourage clients to create as long of a list as they need to feel resolution within themselves. If the situation has gone on for a long time, the list is really long.

In working with Prentice, she created a two-page feelings and thoughts list. It was thorough and felt cathartic for her. From her list, she chose to focus on the following statements:

• I feel mad that that in adding another layer, decisions may be pushed out.
• I feel sad that this decision may slow down the team’s output toward our collective goal.
• I feel afraid that this hire will interrupt our progress in the processes we created that are just starting to flow.
• I feel glad that we are having this conversation.

The next step we took was to connect her feeling/thought to a piece of sensory data. This data grounds the thought and feeling in a fact.

• Sensory Data: You asked me to sit in on an interview to hire my new boss.
• Feeling/Thought: I fear that this hire will interrupt our progress in the processes we created that are just starting to flow.

Once we winnowed down the thought and feeling list and connected those to sensory data/facts, we moved onto intentions. Intentions are always positive. Yours and theirs. Always. Let that roll around your head for a while. Intentions are also rarely shared.

Intentions are a combination of your wants, desires, motivations, aspirations, dreams, and longings for yourself, others, or the relationship.

We all have intentions. Sharing your intentions makes it is clear you care. Sharing your intention creates a vulnerable opening. What happens if your intention is not reciprocated or valued? You risk being exposed or disappointed. Since no one likes to feel exposed or disappointed, you choose, have not practiced, or have unconsciously decided to not identify or share intentions.

The challenge that occurs is we all harbor unspoken intentions which we expect others to uphold. Others do not know these intentions which leads to a misinterpretation of actions or being consistently disappointed in another’s response.

Everyone has intentions. Not sharing your intention creates a guessing game where I see you through my interpretation of your intention, not by your actual intention. This becomes a vicious cycle – I judge your intentions and then you judge mine. This cycle creates churn inside yourself and in relationship.

The alternative is to vulnerably share your intention and enter the unknown of dialogue. The mush separator is your guide to the uncertainty. It cannot eliminate all uncertainty, but it keeps you anchored on the map. Every traveller knows, a map is always helpful when venturing into unknown terrain.

To share your intentions consciously means you put yourself out there to be exposed or disappointed. What you discover is that most people – unless they are submerged in reactivity – appreciate you sharing your intentions and miraculously meet you with their intention or empathy. Instead of feeling disappointed [sad] or exposed [afraid], you feel satisfied [glad].

Before digesting her experience through the mush separator, Prentice planned to find a new job [action] or confront her boss with statements like, “I feel like you are undermining me?” or, “You realize this will cause problems within the team.”

After this practice, Prentice’s conversation with her boss went like this:

• Sensory Data: Hey Sarah, thanks for accepting my meeting. On Tuesday, you sent me an email asking me to sit in on an interview to hire my new boss.
• Feeling/thought: I fear that this hire will interrupt our progress in the processes we created that are just starting to flow. I am concerned that decisions may be pushed out and slow down the team’s output toward our collective goal.
• Intention: I would love to know what need is driving the creation of this position. This will help me be more present at the interview and helpful in the interview process.

This is a very different conversation than would have happened if Prentice went to her boss reactively. Through the practice, Prentice began to see her boss’s context. She could almost understand her reasoning without even talking to her. She began to see what her reactivity had masked.

Through the process of separating the mush, clients experience a shift in their perspective. They feel empathy for the other person and sense the possible emotions, intentions, and judgments that created the event.

If you do not feel a greater sense of empathy, try going through the steps again. What is a conversation you do not want to have? A challenge you fear admitting? A judgment you don’t want to share? An intention that you want to keep hidden?

If you cannot find a felt sense of resolution in your body where you feel revealed and understood by yourself, you will likely not find resolution with the other person. If this is the case, stay with the previous steps before moving on.

Once you have worked through the mush, action is the last step. Conscious action happens when you separate the mush and respond. Unconscious action happens when you react to the mush.

For many, thoughts and action are the most practiced part of this model. Moving from stimulus to response – thoughts and action – happens within your autonomic nervous system. This system operates below your level of conscious control. It is patterned on your early caregiver systems tactics for action.  

If your early caregiver system was a wait and see and let the dust settle type of group, you likely do the same – or in a deliberate rebellion against their way, you do the exact opposite.

If you come from a family that acted immediately, you will likely do the same. Your action is patterned to your nervous system fundamental response to stimulus which began forming in utero.

Dan Seigel has a model called the Window of Tolerance. In this model, he distinguishes two generalized nervous system responses – high and low arousal. Your unconscious reactions fit into one of these categories. You can also be both – as with anything – it depends. Yet commonly you will fall into one or the other with more frequency.

I go high arousal. Unconsciously, I become externally reactive in my action moving about quickly and speaking fast. It took years and a lot of feedback from my family system to see the impact of my unconscious reaction.

Some people go low arousal. They become internally numb often not speaking or fading away. Sometimes, it can take days or weeks to recover.

Moving to action before deciphering the mush, produces a response that is unconscious, uninformed, and reactive. These actions generate a mirrored response in others. They become reactive too.

Deconstructing the mush separates stimulus from response and creates a skillful and dependable path to resolution.

In Prentice’s example, action might take this form:

• Hey Sarah, thanks for accepting my meeting. On Tuesday, you sent me an email asking me to sit in on an interview to hire my new boss.
• I fear that this hire will interrupt our progress in the processes we created that are just starting to flow. I am concerned that decisions may be pushed out and slow down the team’s output toward our collective goal.
• I would love to know what need is driving the creation of this position. This will help me be more present at the interview and helpful in the interview process.
• Wanted Action: [In this case, wanted action is an invitation into a conversation.] Can you share what brought you to this decision?

When you use the mush separator to decipher your experience or structure a conversation, you enter the dialogue ready. You have a map to follow. Your communication is clear. You are accountable for your emotional response. The conversation exists in the space between you and another person. You gain objectivity and help others gain perspective as well. You often implement new and innovative solutions or strangely discover you were addressing the same need the entire time.

Prentice found clarity with her boss. Through the conversation with Prentice, her boss decided she did not need to hire this position. Prentice and her team had it covered. Her boss never thought to inquire. She simply saw a need that she did not share and sought a technical solution. Hire to fill the need.

During tough times, conversations are free – not easy. If you separate the mush, you may uncover resources in yourself, in conversation, or on your teams that you never suspected. This is an adaptive solution to a complex problem. You adapt your behavior and try something new. You enter the unknown. You lead through uncertainty and vulnerability. You build leadership capacity.

Of course, we are here to help. Invite perspective if you need practice or help to separate the mush. Below are more ways to implement the mush separator in practice.

To practice:

Notice

Data. Data. Data. When you become reactive, your brain fills in data from your deep memory to make meaning of the experience. Your brain’s goal is to preserve your safety, sense of belonging, and inherent dignity. Even if preserving these means you sever the relationship.

When you notice data, take in the facts – which are hard to separate from your judgments. What did someone say, do, or how did they act? Look for repetition of events. Take your time. When you look for data, you may need to prolong your reaction by hours, days, or weeks.

Once is an incident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern. If it is a pattern, it will emerge again and again. You may even discover how you co-create it and take a new action to see if that resolves the issue.

Notice your thoughts. We all judge. Allow yourself to notice your judgments. State them as your fact. Try not to justify your judgments. Simply name them. Your judgments reveal the filters through which you interpret your experiences.

Notice how you feel. Stick to mad, sad, glad, or afraid. Those are general headings for feelings like frustrated, annoyed, down, reluctant, and others. You may use the feelings guide to get more details about your feelings. If you feel reactive and use the mush separator stick to the four. It is less confusing.

Notice your hopes, dreams, motivations, desires, wants, and intentions. Intentions are always positive. If you have a hard time finding the positive intention in yourself or others, keep looking. It lives under vulnerability.

Notice if the outcome you originally wanted changes. Prentice’s instinctual response was to find another job. After her work with the mush separator, she gained more influence than she had before.

Explore

Engage others as trusted advisors. When you encounter tough situation, ask someone to be your coach. Tell them you want work through the conversation. Ask them to be as objective as possible.

Explain the mush separator to them and have them watch when you combine feelings and thoughts. Have them help you separate the categories and note when you switch inadvertently.

Use the tool with your family. In our family, we each have a mush separator picture. When we remember, we pull out the model and work through the mush systematically. It is not easy and instantly creates vulnerability. Like I stated before, you can’t be right and vulnerable.

The explicit use of the tool and being together in learning helps build trust. It provides a safe structure to follow for the conversation. It calms people down. It encourages active listening to clarify what is meant. It helps you learn how to name the feeling, need, and thought when stuck in judgment.

Apply

The power of this tool is in the practice. Make time to notice and name data each day. Use repetitive events that happen each day to practice.

• Name what you are doing: I am walking. I am holding my coffee cup. I am looking at the ground.
• Name what you see: I see Hamish, Anoosh, and Marie in the break room or on the screen. I see there is no coffee in the pot. I hear someone using the coffee grinder.
• Notice the action people take. Marie and Anoosh thank Hamish for making the coffee.

When we take time to notice what is occurring in the present moment, we gather new data that may disprove our judgment that “Hamish never does anything for anyone.” Or that “Anoosh is ungrateful.”

Thoughts are easy to come by. We are trained to name them and value their importance. As you apply the mush separator, you learn the tipping point when your thoughts go from productive about the experience to unhealthily judgmental. When you go over the edge into unhealthy judgment, you stir up stories in your mind that create reaction in your body. If you find yourself at that edge, name your feelings.

You can name your feelings all day long. We have feelings all the time. The more your practice the more nuances you will notice. For the first 100 times you use the mush separator your feelings are limited to: mad, sad, glad, or afraid.

Throughout the day, notice your mood and name your feeling when you:

• Enter work.
• Leave work
• Pick up your kids.
• Arrive home.
• Go to bed.
• Drink your coffee. 

Or at any other time throughout the day when you notice a change in your mood.

• Name your hopes, dreams, longings, intentions, motivations, and desires about daily events.
• Name how you feel when you say them.

Notice when you move from stimulus to response without pause. Stimulus might look something like, “Where is the report I asked for two hours ago?” You might respond, “I didn’t know you wanted that two hours ago!”

To find the space between stimulus and response, you say, “I hear you wanted the report two hours ago. I feel mad. I didn’t hear your by when. I want to meet this need of yours. I apologize for the misunderstanding and will work on the report now. I will give it to you in an hour. Will that work?”

New practices always feel awkward. If you don’t practice, you never move beyond awkward. If you don’t have a trusted practice partner, invite perspective. We love separating the mush.

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[1]Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. 

Mindful Leadership – Cultivate Awareness

Wake up your Observer

Awareness is the ability to notice and name your thoughts, feelings/moods, internal state, and actions alone and during interactions with others.

Client Story

Miranda shared some data she thought was significant to our coaching session but was not sure why. Since she was young, strangers in public places regularly asked her if she was doing OK or if something was wrong. She would look at them stupefied and reply that all was well. She wondered aloud why they were concerned. They would say she looked upset. She had no idea what they were referring to. She felt fine. Only to find out years later that her face was telling a different story. One she needed to hear.

Identify

“We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.” Anaïs Nin

All people have their unique way of interpreting the same data and information. Applying awareness – an ability of your mind to observe your actions, thoughts, and impact, wakes up your internal observer to be of service.

Waking up your internal or mental observer gathers data around your patterns in relationship. You learn how you interpret what you see, hear, and experience. You learn that how you interpret your thoughts is not the truth. It may be your truth, but it is not THE truth.

Your brain and body gather data. Your historical experiences shaped you to respond differently to objective data than others. Occasionally, you meet someone or some people who interpret data similarly. You feel seen and valued in this group. When you encounter another person or group where whose reality you do not agree with, you perceive them as wrong or not informed. You may disregard their perspective or dismiss them or their perspective.

The way you respond to others creates the experience of you that over time becomes solidified in your relationships, at work, or in your community. Your reputation is based on HOW others interpret your actions, NOT your intentions. When many people interpret you similarly, you are stuck in a pattern. If you do not want to be stuck with this reputation, you need to wake up your observer, build awareness, and change your patterns through new practices.

Awareness broadens your understanding of yourself and your perspective of others. It helps you understand that you hold a truth that is not universal. It helps you see that other people hold equally loved truths. Neither truth is right nor wrong, they simply are. Your job is to understand your truth enough that you can make space for others.

Making space for the truth of others is a skill. It is not taught. It is often counter to how we are raised or taught. Many are taught implicitly to defend and protect their answer, perspective, or worldview. If we do not have a strong or the right answer, we have little value.

Defend and protect is your default safety channel in the brain. It is antiquated using an evolutionarily old area of the brain. To thrive, you need to learn and practice a new skill that accesses the more modern areas of your brain and connects to and settles your vagus nerve. The simple skill of awareness is the way. Awareness is a skill that really will carry you into your next promotion, pay raise, career path, or a solid and strong relationship with your chosen family.

Your mind and nervous system evolved in layers. You began as a sensory-motor creature. In utero, your skin literally folds over to become your spinal cord and the housing of your brain.

The next layer to develop was your brain stem. This function provided our species with more choices. Instead of simply sensing and moving, we gained choice and could now freeze, fight, or flee.

Mammals then developed the limbic brain. This area creates the ability to communicate with our young without words through sound, sensation, and movement.

The last layer to develop was your neocortex. This area manages complex thought, like that around social order and systems and other processes you are familiar with today.

The nervous system evolved in conjunction with the brain. It is as integral to thought and action as the brain.

Your brain is a pattern detection organ. Through the nervous system, the human body sends over 11 million bits of information per second to the brain for processing. The minds’ purpose is to process and transmit this information through electrical signals, hormones, and neural peptides with a goal to survive by efficiently decoding, categorizing, and responding to what your senses perceive.

The mind consciously processes 50 bits of information per second, yet your body and mind take in 11 million. Based on your early lived experience and continuing throughout your life, your mind forms short-cuts – it has to. Information from your senses signal your deep memory and quickly identity and categorize experiences.

You respond to current events based on past experiences. This reflexive loop is strengthened when you resolve the situation in a way that feels like you. In a way you recognize.

This process saves vital mental energy. The brain in a resting state uses about 20% of our body’s resources. When you need to think outside of your patterned way – like when reading new information – your brain uses more resources. You become mentally tired and often get a mild to severe headache.

To save mental energy for your survival, your system is hardwired to form associations and then define the world by them. Echoing Anaïs Nin, scientist Amanda Blake says, we see the world as we are, not as it is.

You see the world the way you have been taught – not the way the world is. Yet, you believe you are seeing the world objectively. This causes a lot of strife in relationships, a lack of innovation at work, and a fixation on keeping your changing world the same.

At work, your body takes in data through your senses. If your body and mind recognize the data, it responds instantly through your habits of action, mood, and thought. Brain scans show that only your deep memory is active in these situations.

If what your senses perceive is new information, brain scans show activity in many areas, especially if you perceive a threat to your survival. Your brain works hard to resolve the threat making rapid associations from your lifelong habit patterns of thought, emotion, and action.

In the modern world, perceived threats to your survival take many forms and are usually not physical threats. They are threats to your value at work or home, your connection to others, and your safety to provide for yourself or your family. These perceived threats initiate a stress response in your system which initiates your defend and protect response.

If you have been paying attention, this means when you feel stress you are responding to the world from your deep memory and using only one-fourth of your brain’s capacity – an ancient yet vital capacity. This happens unconsciously and autonomically. To have influence over yourself in this moment you wake up your observer through awareness.

When you wake up your observer, you begin to acknowledge that way you see the world is not the way the world is. You start to understand that to see the world the way it is, you need to look for and take in new data. 

Daniel Kahneman, a Ph.D. Nobel Prize-winning economist, in his book Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, speaks of two systems within the mind. These systems are different than the layers. The systems combine faculties within all the layers of the brain and nervous system.

System One is our “fast, instinctive, and emotional brain.” It quickly makes meaning of what it perceives and acts based on past experiences. System Two is “slower, more deliberate, and more logical.” Also called the lazy brain. It will only and reluctantly engage when pressed. It takes a lot more energy to operate System Two than System One. The brain’s job is to maximize efficiency in service of survival. System Two takes too many resources to be used frequently.

System Two is the part of our brain that forms new associations. When you get a headache from a lot of new information, your System Two brain has been active. As a leader, you must be able to activate your System Two brain. And here is why.

The best leaders are present to the people and circumstances that surround them. They pause their work and focus on what is in front of them. They realize that other people hold an essential part of the whole truth. These leaders use their skillset choicefully. Unless someone taught you how to be present, and you practice being present, most people live in habitual patterned responses – you see the world as you are.

When you wake up your observer, you become present to your habitual patterned ways. You become conscious. Consciousness is the ability to apply your attention to the present moment and see it more objectively.

You are taught to use your minds to form thoughts through reasoning, but you are rarely taught to observe your thoughts objectively. As you begin to observe data more objectively, your System One brain will likely try to convince you to return to your patterned way. It will mount a defense in many ways: physical discomfort, mental fatigue, stories of how you already do this, and why this is not useful. You are changing a lifetime of well-loved patterns in the brain that have kept you safe but may no longer serve your future self.

When you wake your observer, you begin to observe your thoughts, emotions, and actions. Through this process, you can change what you see, how you think, and what you do. You become a better leader.

Notice

To build awareness, observe the thoughts in your head as mere thoughts. Thoughts that have no value. Thoughts that could be right or wrong. Notice if you become attached to certain thoughts, crave them over others, or feel aversion to other thoughts, and desire them to go away. In this way, thoughts become pure data.

The breath is a common tool for building a practice of awareness. The breath is constant. It is regular and has a rhythm. We feel it in many places – the nostrils, the upper lip, the throat, chest, and abdomen. Paying attention to your breath anchors you in your body. It settles your nervous system as you are in the here and now – not lost in your thoughts or worries. The here and now – this moment or presence – takes you out of your habit patterns of thought, mood, and action through your attention applied to the breath in the moment.

Again, your conscious mind only comprehends 50 bits per second of the 11 million it receives. This flow of information has a huge impact on your nervous system. Your nervous system mounts your initial survival response. It determines what information gets efficiently prioritized and sent to the brain. The information you process and rank generates your particular series of automatic thoughts and responses, which are different than anyone else’s.

When you notice your breath, you interrupt the information you send to the brain. This slows down your automatic responses. This allows you to see your thoughts instead of be your thoughts. This is the first step to wake up the power of your observer and choose what you think and how you respond – instead of react.

Explore

At the start of this article, I recounted my client whose face was telling a story she needed to hear. My client had no idea how to begin to observe and understand what her face was telling her and others. She needed help.

We began by helping her witness her breath. This simple act of noticing the breath allowed her to experience and explore her patterns of thought, emotion, and action. My client realized that she often held her breath. This created a shutdown in her physiological system, which her face displayed. Inside, she felt settled. Outside, she sent a different signal. She was being incongruent. This discrepancy had a huge impact on her leadership. It led people to distrust her. She had no choice in her response. She simply reacted and was unaware of her reaction.

Her body generated a stress response to her lack of breath. Breath impacts the vagus nerve – a cranial nerve that modulates your stress hormones and your ability to freeze, fight, and connect with others socially. When my client held her breath, this cranial nerve sent a signal to the brain to respond. The body and brain then responded in its patterned way – underneath her consciousness.

These patterns of response happen daily beneath your consciousness. When you wake your observer, you learn how your patterned responses impact the action you take and the story your body tells others.

To explore the impact the breath has on your body, practice conscious breathing. Set your timer for one minute. Bring your attention to your breath. The following questions will guide your exploration.

Where do you feel the breath?

• In your throat?
• On your nostrils?
• In your belly?
• In your shoulders?
• Is it high in your chest or lower in your belly?

How does your body move when you breathe?

• Is the breath fast and shallow?
• Slow and deep?
• What moves when you breathe – your shoulders, your side ribs, your back?
• What areas expand and contract with ease?
• What areas feel hard to move?

What kind of pressure do you feel when you breathe?

• When you inhale, do you feel the pressure of the expansion of your lungs?
• Where do you feel it – your chest, your back, your shoulders, your belly?
• Is any area tight or restricted?

At the end of the minute, notice if you feel any different. Notice what you feel. To explore more begin to apply this practice during your day.

Apply

This breath practice wakes up your observer. You can bring this anywhere: before bed to get to sleep, upon waking to start your day, in the grocery line, on your morning commute, or in a meeting.

Traditionally, breath practice is done seated. Sometimes when you lay down and practice noticing your breath, you fall asleep. This could be just what you need. If this happens every time, you might want to try being seated.

At the start, find a place to sit where you will not be disturbed. Set your timer for one minute. Use the questions in EXPLORE to guide the experience of your breath.

At your next meeting, take one minute to breathe. Be present to the meeting – listen and participate, but also place your attention on your breath. You will likely not be able to focus your attention on your breath for long. Try again. The more you practice, the more choice you will have with your attention.

You can also apply this practice when you are in motion.

Most people look down when they are walking – focused on the next task, lost in thought, or on what they will do when they arrive at their destination.

The next time you are walking, look up. Look around. Feel yourself breathing as you walk. Feel your body moving. Bring your attention to what you see – size, shape, and color. Take in as much as you can during your journey. If you lose track or find your mind wandering, come back to the moment and observe what you feel, see, smell, hear, or touch.

The more you wake up your observer, the more awareness will translate into choiceful action when challenges happen. Instead of reacting, you will find a space between stimulus and response. A place to settle yourself when tensions rise before you react. Waking the observer is foundational to becoming an extraordinary leader.

Emotional Regulation: Part Three of Three

Part three of a three-part series on emotional habits, capacity, and regulation.

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In the previous two posts, I left you pondering your emotional habits and how reflection on your habits and a desire for a new way helps you sustain the pain of change and increase your emotional capacity. This article dives into the HOW – the practices of emotional regulation and completes the series. Go here to read part one and here to read part two. If you have any questions or want to learn more email Tracy at info@mccarthyrekart.com.

If you are ready to bring emotional learning into your leadership presence, join Nourish – a non-traditional, somatic leadership development program built to liberate your mind and body.

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Emotional regulation is finding a balance between expressing your emotions and containing them[1]. Unconscious emotional regulation automatically happens for most people and is perfectly suited for low-stress environments. As the pressure increases, having a strategy and practices to emotionally regulate is critical to your continued growth and success.

Expressing your emotions means outwardly showing or naming what you feel inside. Showing and naming can happen simultaneously – you show anger through the pitch, rate, and tone of your voice and maybe the words you use, and you say you are mad.

Containing means holding back from emotional expression until you have digested your emotions, are in a safe space, or at a more appropriate time. This means you feel the sensation of anger arise, and consciously choose how to or not to show or name anger until you are in private or have moved through the emotion’s intensity.

Most people have an autonomic and unconscious ratio and rhythm of containment and expression. Regulating this ratio is based on your emotional habits and capacity.

For many, when your body is in a state of homeostasis – non-disruption, low stress – you express and contain emotions with ease. You do not consciously choose expression over containment. Your body and mind system autonomically shifts back and forth.

In non-disruption, your nervous system resides in a parasympathetic state – your rest and digest response. It sends settled signals throughout your body and brain via your sensations and thoughts. This state releases calming hormones and initiates digestion and healing. This state broadens what you see, hear, think, and feel. Your habit of regulation in times of low stress was gifted to you from your early holding system – the people who raised you.

As pressure rises, your body initiates your stress response. It generates and interprets sensations and routes signals to your brain and body. Depending on your emotional habits and capacity, your body and mind system autonomically switch your nervous system into a sympathetic state – your sport and stress or defend and protect response. This releases a series of neural peptides, shuts down digestion, and increases the delivery of cortisol – a stress hormone. Your sympathetic response shrinks what you see, hear, think, and feel. Your habit of regulation in times of high stress was also gifted to you from your early holding system.

Your body and mind systems evolved and are patterned to your emotional habits. If you choose any action different than your automatic response, you do not feel like you.

New practices create disruption. Choosing a new way to act or think is change. Change creates dissonance within your system. Disruption increases stress which initiates your sympathetic nervous system response. To know yourself and manage the increased stress, your body and mind revert to your emotional habits and the cycle resets.

This reset makes change difficult. You want to change, and your body and mind are powerful systems that developed habits to manage your survival. The only way to change and move with and through your survival response is through the simple and regular practice of something new.

Your survival response and your reactions are learned not chosen. Your emotional habits are simply life-long practices, not fixed personality traits. Change is possible through new practices.

Emotional regulation was implicitly adopted and practiced in your early holding system. Your emotional response is hardwired to your sensations – nearly imperceptible signals you were not taught to notice. Unless you consciously practice emotional regulation, your emotional capacity nor your habits will change. You continue to have the same outcomes from your response and are mystified at how to attain a different result.

As stress rises, your mind does not realize the pressure is building. Your body and mind utilize your existing emotional habits to channel the stress. Your system is amazing at managing stress until you reach your emotional capacity and the limits of your habits, then you react.

Depending on your emotional habits and capacity, you either go into a depressive state of low arousal and close down or disconnect, or you go into a state of hyperarousal and release energy through the unregulated expression of emotions, anxiety, or motion.[2] The extremes of these responses are based on your physiology and the chemical balance in your system, your emotional habits, and what is at stake in the systems around you.

Especially when pressure increases, emotional regulation – express, contain, or both – is the key to settling your nervous system, increasing your emotional capacity, and changing your emotional habits. The difficulty is gently making friends with your body to slowly override your emotional habits. The practices themselves are easy.

The first practice of emotional regulation is to notice. You notice where you are, that you have sensations running through your body or you sense nothing, and that you have feelings. Through noticing where you are, what you sense in your body, or that you feel disrupted, you build self-awareness.

This practice of noticing develops the skill of pause-and-reflect before you react. This act of pause-and-reflect builds self-awareness and choice. Understanding in your bones that you have a choice is critical to happiness.

The second practice of emotional regulation is naming. Through naming what you sense and how you feel you build body-based emotional literacy. You have more names for what you sense and feel. You move beyond the common choices of frustrated, disappointed, happy, or uncertain and name emotional and sensate nuances important to increasing your emotional capacity.

Noticing and naming provide a somatic anchor to the present moment. You know in this moment what you feel and sense. You build self-knowledge as you connect the sensation to the thought and feeling. This returns you to the present. Your body enters a parasympathetic response. You see and hear more of what is in front of you. Through this practice, you create a one-degree shift toward more capacity.

The third practice of emotional regulation is to notice and name your resources. A resource is something that you have or have access to that provides sustenance, support, sanctuary, or sanity.

It can be a person – a friend, colleague, or boss. It might be a place or an act – like sitting in your kitchen or a window to the outside, a conscious break from work, or a walk. It might be words of wisdom or affirmations. Whatever your resources are name them, create a collage of resource images, and practice using them when you feel settled. This will ensure your ability to access them when disrupted.

Noticing and naming feelings, sensations, thoughts, needs, and resources settles the nervous system. It clues your mind into your body’s current response to stress. You become self-aware. You know what disrupted feels like. You build a strategy to manage your response. Over time, your form of homeostasis – your system at rest – changes. You increase your choices and shift your baseline emotional capacity and habits.

These are tools of somatic practice – a field of body-based strategies, theories, and methods that aim to rewire your nervous system and assist you to shift your relationship to emotions, trauma, and the way these are stored and processed in your body.

The benefit of these practices is a settled nervous system, a calming effect on other people, a metabolizing of your emotional baggage, and conscious choice in your actions. Noticing and naming increases your baseline capacity to feel, be present and flexible, and ultimately leads to increased happiness and freedom.

Changing your emotional habits is not an easy path. Just like changing a daily habit of coffee consumption, you will feel disrupted – your mind and body react. You ignore the habitual and comfortable action you are used to taking – having the cup of coffee or responding with your emotional habits – and create a new practice.

Reflection is the fourth practice of emotional regulation. What are your emotional habits?

For this reflection, think of a recent difficult situation. Where do you see yourself in the window of tolerance diagram? Do you go to hyperarousal – yelling, arguing, or moving or emoting erratically? Or do you go to hypo-arousal – you become quiet, check out, or cut off? Choose which one mostly fits your emotional habits. It can be both depending on the circumstances. Choose one. The one that embarrasses you the most.

Now place yourself back in the difficult situation. Instead of enacting your habitual response, you choose to emotionally regulate. You contain your emotions and stay calm, or you express your emotions and remain present in the conversation. You don’t yell or leave.

What do you think would happen to your body? What thoughts would race through your head? How would the people around you respond?

From experience both personally and with my clients, I say with certainty that you and those around you will feel very uncomfortable. Your thoughts will be a jumble. Your body will sweat, shake, churn, or shut down.

Through witnessing hundreds of people try, change is possible. Over time, and with continued practice in an alternate response, the disruption you feel becomes less. Your ability to choose your response increases. People feel safer and more connected to you.

These simple practices consciously shift your emotional habits. You choose the ratio and rhythm of your emotional expression instead of your habits choosing for you. You build new neural pathways which increase your emotional capacity and choose to express or contain your emotions.

At first, you won’t succeed. Progress is slow. Changing any habit – especially long-held emotional habits is hard and takes time and practice. After a while, you notice a shift. It is then time to create a solid commitment to the new way – this is the fifth practice to build emotional regulation.

You could say this is a circular practice as commitment often initiates the new practices. And any commitment without tangible data showing success is hard to sustain. This is why, in this article, commitment is fifth. After some practice and through a clear and conscious commitment to be different will you be able to sustain the discomfort that arises through change.

When you build this capacity, future change is less daunting, really! Stay the course. Devote the time to new practices. Build the skills. The power is in the practice.

If you want to learn new practices, and build your emotional capacity, change your emotional habits, and learn regulation, please join me in my course about emotions called Nourish Summer. It will radically alter your life trajectory for the better, create emotional health, and begin the journey to a felt sense of vitality.

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[1] Lisa Damour author of Under Pressure and Untangled

[2] This model is called the Window of Tolerance by Dan Seigel in his book Mindsight

Processing Emotions

I have been struggling with what or if to write anything about the ongoing tragedies facing children, black people, non-able-bodied folx, and LGBTQIA+ in our country. I only know that I find solace in the words of others, and as a white cis-gender woman of privilege, I have practices to share that build emotional capacity and provide access to your body’s inherent wisdom.

Our work with leaders and teams in organizations and the courses we teach are based on the principle that the conscious practice and application of skills are critical to change, and discomfort is essential to building emotional capacity.

When tragedy strikes, I feel overwhelmed with emotion. My feelings have a pile-on party. I feel every feeling I have ever felt all at once. I also have many needs that are in hiding under my go-to response of  “do something now!” You may have a different go-to response. Do you know what that is? Underneath your response are layers of unmet needs.

At times like this, I rely on a practice that builds my emotional literacy and capacity. I sort through my feelings and needs using GROK Cards.

We – our business and family – use these cards regularly: several times when Neil fell off the cliff and during tough family conversations. Neil and I bring GROK cards into organizations to sort through difficult subjects around gender and race and have generative conversations. We use the feelings and needs lists in meetings as a quick reference while working with the mush separator.

GROK Cards provide words. As words are in short supply when overwhelmed, the list helps me and others name feelings and needs in moments of intensity or complexity.

Naming settles your nervous system (Marshall Rosenberg 1999 and Brené Brown 2021). It brings clarity to the conversation. I cannot judge myself or you anymore as you and I both feel and need. This brings us together on common ground.

Though these cards are simple and unbelievably settling, people resist them.

Why?

It is vulnerable to name what you need and feel. Naming reveals and releases what is underneath the presenting emotion which is most often sadness and hopelessness and their somatic partner – tears.

If you are overwhelmed with feeling, tears are a release of emotion. The expression of anger through words or gestures is also a release of emotion.

Tears draw others in. People wonder and ask, ”What’s wrong? How can I support you?”

Anger pushes people away. Very few people want to move toward an angry person. Many people want to support someone in tears.

Anger is an important emotion. No less or more important than sadness, just different and often misused when a person is overwhelmed.

Whatever emotion we choose to express has the power to generate a sensation that sparks action in others. if you feel anger, others will match your anger. if you feel sadness, other’s body will respond in kind. This is the function of your mirror neurons.

In the book The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, Martin Prechtel, a fabulous storyteller, speaks about grief. In villages of Guatemala, where he lived for many years, people would contain the bereaved for around a week, maybe three weeks. They would cry and wail together, keep tabs on the grieving, and feed them.

They knew that if they left this person alone with their grief, anger would likely consume and inspire them to act out in vengeance, build a coalition to seek retribution, or take their own life.

As we collectively process the tragedy of another school shooting, I encourage you to notice and name and feel your feelings and share your needs. Be accountable to what you feel and need. Be witnessed in your sadness or grief. Learn what is underneath your anger.

Sharing your feelings and needs builds community and connection. It forms solidarity between people that were before separate – even when we are in the same family system or organization.

groups of diverse people moving towards each other.

If this is not a common practice, it will be hard. Start with yourself. Name what you feel and need. See below for a practice I taught my children and teach my clients.

If this practice feels out of reach, and the only emotion that arises is anger, it is essential that you build emotional literacy as there is likely a lot of grief and other emotions misrepresented as anger.

This bears repeating again. Anger is valid and necessary. In fact, anger is essential. Yet anger, with unprocessed underlying feelings and needs is like a wildfire that consumes you and all in its path until the snow or rain falls (this is a metaphor for tears).

If you are uncertain of the necessity of tears or have a hard time conjuring them, invite perspective. Tears are your body’s emotional cleanser. A clean burn of anger is always more impactful.

May the following practice be of benefit:

You may use GROK Cards if you have them. If not, print these lists and circle, write down, or pull ALL the feelings and needs words that apply to you. Yes, all.

If you believe there are too many, check your judgment and continue. A lot of feelings and needs mean there is a lot of them to sort through. You are not broken. You are in the process of healing.  

If there are many people, each person takes a turn.

Sort your pile or list into three categories:

1. immediate feelings and needs for this event or moment,
2. pervasive feelings and needs for this time period, and
3. life-long feelings and needs – you cannot remember ever not having these.

Feel the breath in your body. Sense its rhythm. Notice what you see.

Name how you feel right now. Use your hands to point to or pick up the word that represents how you feel. If this word is not present, choose another word.

This physical practice is a somatic acknowledgement of your feelings. Do the same for your needs as you look at these words.

Through this practice, you have taken a step toward emotional literacy and building your capacity.

If it helps, here are the feelings and needs words that came up for me during this last few weeks (years!) of tragedy:

• Feelings:
  • Now: furious, confused, lonely, shocked, and sad.
  • Pervasive: worried, disappointed, resentful, discouraged, and overwhelmed.
  • Life-long: concerned and tender.
• Needs:
  • Now: clarity, rest, and mourning.
  • Pervasive: friendship and effectiveness.
  • Life-long: to be heard, power in my world, community, and freedom.

As I look at this list, I feel settled, and I need celebration. Settled that I feel clarity about what I feel and need. And celebration for taking the time to acknowledge and presence myself to the now.

If you need help sorting through what comes up, invite perspective. You are not alone.

Emotional Capacity – Part Two of Three

Part two of a three-part series on emotional habits, capacity, and regulation.

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Last week, I left you holding the phone…, uh, information that you have emotional habits. These habits come from your early holding system – the people who raised you. You learn them implicitly – no one consciously teaches them to you. Only through reflection and understanding that emotions stem from sensations are you able to change your emotional habits and increase your capacity.

Emotional capacity is the ability to feel big or small emotions and remain in the present. You know you are feeling. You notice your sensations. You understand the messages these sensations are relaying to your brain. You create space between stimulus – the sensation, and response – your thoughts or judgments. You don’t spray your anger, nor do you need to hide or shut down your tears.

If this feels like a lot to manage, it is. Emotional capacity is the ability to regulate your emotions in more and more intense situations. I will share more about emotional regulation in part three of this series, but for now, let’s dig into the foundation of emotions and the roots of your emotional capacity.

As I stated in part one, emotions are generated by your sensations. As most people have some form of sensory motor amnesia, your emotional capacity is limited by your emotional habits.

These habits feel like you. They are. When you go outside of your habits, for example, say you decide to not drink coffee that day – your body responds. You drinking coffee every day is a habit that your body relies on. When you change the habit, your system tells you through headaches and brain fog, that you should lay in bed to recover from this gross breach in your commitment to your body, or you should go make a cup right now and get back on track.

Your body has the same response to changing your emotional habits. As you reflect on your habits and the impact those have on others, you begin to see that maybe, just maybe, your impact is not optimal or creates collateral damage. You want to change your emotional habits – stop drinking coffee – but you are afraid of the impact of that change – headaches – or in this case, the unknown. As you don’t know what will happen to your identity or your impact as you shift. This knowledge is destabilizing.

If you choose to shift your practices, you consciously leave your body’s optimal state. This state is called homeostasis.[1] It includes all your standard habits and follows a fairly regular daily trajectory.

Homeostasis does not mean your body is in THE optimal state, it simply means the place where you feel like you. You when you are not disrupted.

Everyone’s homeostasis is different. No matter who you are, any shift causes destabilization of your whole body.

Building your emotional capacity disrupts your emotional habits. You consciously choose to practice something new, and your body responds as if you are disrupting homeostasis – not having the cup of coffee. Many parts of your body and mind loudly caution you to return to homeostasis. In the coffee example, you feel brain fog and a headache. The same pattern occurs when you change any habit.

For example, when I was expanding my emotional capacity to remain and engage in conflict, I literally had to pace and move my body to keep myself in the room and pay attention to the other person. I had so much energy flowing through my body that needed to be released and not sprayed.

Homeostasis – my emotional habits – told my body that I needed to flee. I felt like I was trapped between my body wanting out and my mind – upholding my new commitment – encouraging me to stay. It was physically painful, yet I felt no acute pain. It was as if my internal organs were reforming.

A shift in homeostasis is painful. If you do not know you will feel pain, you immediately listen to your body and return to your emotional habits. The unknown and unforeseen pain activates your survival instinct patterned by the emotional habits of your early holding system.

In my situation, I knew the pain would happen. I had long understood that as the emotional tenor of a situation increased my MO (Mode of Operation) was to leave or create such a disruption that others left. I had formed this emotional habit in my early holding system. I was ready to let go of it in my mind, yet my body was like NO F_ING WAY!

I first learned my MO through reflecting on my behavior and impact and feeling a desire for a more skillful and flexible approach. This path led to lots of conversation with my early holding system and more reflection on my behavior.

Receiving feedback from the people I love and witnessing my behavior was painful. Again, I had to work to stay. The feedback was often embarrassing – I never knew I had that impact or never saw my response in the way they reflected.  

Even though uncomfortable, these conversations were a bearable way to make space for a more intense experience. My body began adjusting to the discomfort – homeostasis was shifting.

A concurrent step in my process was to regulate my behaviors and reactions. To do this I practiced mindful action. I would actively locate my body’s literal center by either placing a hand or my imagination onto the place two inches above my belly button. This mental and physical activity was a somatic anchor that grounded me in the present where I could see the person in front of me – not my projection of them.

Through consistent practice, I was able to move the needle on my response during a conflict. I responded without stammering. I could even loudly argue my point without losing attention on my center. I kept my dignity and maintained the dignity of the other. This was a big win for me.

The commitment to build my capacity was not hard to name. The difficult part was the practice of actually building my capacity. I had to suffer through the pain of my homeostatic response shifting while entering the unknown of change through practicing something new. Ultimately, suffering increased my emotional capacity to stay in conflict, and return to my center quickly when disrupted.

I had a mental picture of success. I had built the skills. None of that mattered if I could not understand what might happen inside and partner with my body.

Stay tuned next week for the final installment on emotional regulation… Read part one on emotional habits here.

Ready to jump into learning? Sign up here for Nourish Summer – my somatic, body-based, highly-effective, non-traditional leadership program to expand your emotional capacity.

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[1] Allan Fogel in Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness

Emotional Habits – Part One of Three

Part One of a three-part series on emotional habits, capacity, and regulation.

Person with mask covering their face.

Emotions are a gift of your birth as a human. At times, emotions also feel burdensome – like crying when you really want to offer critical feedback or having an outburst of anger that is greater than the event warrants – maybe even embarrassing.

Maybe you even wish you felt more. You are not sure why you don’t feel. And, though you try to allow emotions, nothing you do has an impact on your stoicism.

In these cases, emotions become a burden you carry instead of a gift to be explored. Burdensome emotions are the result of your emotional habits, a slew of stored up and unprocessed feelings, and misinterpreted – yet important – messages from your sensations. In these examples, you don’t have emotions, your emotions have you.

In very inconvenient situations, you are at the mercy of your emotions. Stress is likely high. Your reserves of patience are likely low. You are being misunderstood or worse – accused of negligent behavior. 

You want a way to understand and process emotions and you are uncertain of where to start. Your next steps are unknown and daunting. Where or how do you begin to sort this out?

Included in this article are concepts and practices that support you to metabolize your past and present emotions and build a new way to harness the power of your body. This is the first of a three-part series on emotional habits, capacity, and regulation emotions where I share concepts and offer simple practices that lead to more skillful choices.

Emotional Habits

Emotions are one of your body’s stress-cleansing systems. Without any effort from your conscious mind, your body automatically responds to its environment. It generates data from experiences. This data is delivered to the body and brain via sensations that travel through the nervous system. The nervous system signals co-activate of many brain areas – the limbic system, amygdala, hippocampus, and others – and produce an action. Others in your environment see this action and respond.

Emotions are physiological responses and reactions to a stressor. Sensations are the foundation of your emotions. In a healthy system, as your response to internal or external stimuli builds the mounting pressure is released through emoting. You honorably and gracefully clean your emotional slate and feel settled. 

If your physiological system has no way to skillfully release the pressure of these emotions, you likely store them up or spray them – or both. Not because you want to, you just have not learned another way. 

Your responses outline your emotional habits. These habits cause all sorts of problems at the moment – anxiety, yelling, or a silencing of your own voice, and pay dividends through chronic pain and other ailments later in life.

Emotional habits are the way your body and mind system learns to manage sensations that arise, especially during moments of disruption or overwhelm. You interpret the sensations through the habits passed down from your early holding system – the people and community who raised you.

Your body-mind system interprets signals exteroceptively via your senses like what you see, hear, or touch – think loud voices or the feeling of slime, or stressors like interpersonal conflict, a failed work outcome, or time delays. You also translate sensations interoceptively through your inner organs and body – think butterflies in your stomach or a catch in your throat. Thoughts generated by your mind produce sensations too – think anxiety or mental churn and subsequent fatigue. 

As you have spent your lifetime practicing your automatic reaction to these sensations, you do not think you are reacting, you think you are responding. You believe your actions are conscious choices. Yet, more likely, your body is responding or reacting in your patterned way. This is called sensory motor amnesia[2]. You have amnesia about your patterns and without reflection and new practices, you cannot change. 

You may even say things like, “Well that’s just the way I am.” This is not true. You are what you have learned to be. 

Person’s clenched fists on table.

Reflection helps you identify your learned emotional habits – the unconscious ways your system manages your emotions. Only through seeing your actions and habits more clearly can change happen.

You were gifted your emotional habits by your early holding system. The people who raised you did not consciously teach you how to notice, name, and manage your emotions, and herein lies the challenge. You learned them implicitly through observation and practice. Your emotional habits are literally built into the hardwiring that exists in your nervous system.

Your emotional habits are interwoven into your thoughts, opinions, and judgments – the very foundation of your identity. They are embedded in your relationships. They are threaded through every aspect of your body and nervous system. The only way to change your emotional habits is to do your work – 

• learn what you don’t know about yourself, 
• reflect on how you impact others, and 
• experiment with new practices.

To learn what you don’t know about yourself, you reflect on your impact on other people. How do other people respond to you? Not how you want people to respond to you. This is an important distinction.

Begin gathering data. If more than one person thinks you are not accurately representing something, then you need to look at your habits. If people rarely respond to what you say, there is something here for you to learn. 

Once is an incident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern. If you have heard the feedback before, there is a truth to uncover. This is a hard practice and a tough lens through which to see yourself. The act of looking generates emotion. If it does not, you may not really be seeing or you may have blocks to feeling.

Person with heart next to face.

We all want to believe our caring hearts are revealed in our interactions with others. Everyone has honorable intentions. This does not mean your impact matches your intention. Often, it does not.

As you notice your impact or lack of impact, the dissonance between who you thought you were and who you are creates a rip in the fabric of your identity. Changing your emotional habits shifts your fundamental identity – the way you perceive yourself and how you are perceived by others. A ‘who am I now’ question begins to emerge. This is a perfect place to find support to build new practices.

Emotions are gifts and can both literally and metaphorically bring you to your knees. Reflection is intended to be a slow process of discovery. You notice your habits and build resilience to feel and eventually inquire about your impact and build new practices. Through this process, you build emotional capacity.

Stay tuned next week for the second part in the series on emotional capacity…

Go here to sign up for information about courses like Nourish Summer that build your emotional capacity and shift your emotional habits.

You Go First

“You go first.”

This is the thought in my head when I become reactive to my partner, child, or a family member, and occasionally clients, friends, or others.

“You go first.”

You be vulnerable. You apologize. You make the first move of reconciliation.

Only problem is, I have a hard time waiting. So, I usually go first. Which isn’t always pretty. Because I feel reactive and act from my habit pattern not from a behavior I choose.

I also begrudgingly know when I have this thought, “you go first,” that the problem does not lie with them, but with me. Again, I am reactive. I have cut off from them. I am above them. I am too good to be bad, wrong, or go first.

Why do we play these games that sometimes feel like life or death? What prevents us from being vulnerable in the moment?

As a species we are psycho-neuro-biologically hard wired to search for safety, belonging, and dignity. When these have been met in our unique way, we feel settled.

When we do not feel safe, feel that we do not belong, or feel that we have lost our dignity, our body system senses this disconnect and responds by initiating old habit patterns of action – the reactive self. Our response protects these hard wired needs from real or perceived threats.

This response is well practiced, justified, and automatic. We often do not even know we are reactive. We know we are right, and they are wrong, and they should apologize, dammit.

This is not a bad thing. We can live a mostly satisfying life unconscious of our reactive responses. It is only challenging if the way we want to be is at odds with who we are in those moments. This was the case for me.

I knew I wanted connection with the people that I loved, but I struggled with needing them to honor my dignity so that I could feel connected. Through the desire to fill this psycho-neuro-biological need of dignity, I was egocentric – only seeing myself, and what I might need, not the other people and what they may need.

It is really hard to go first when your ego is on the line.

Ego is a psychological term meaning a collection of beliefs about the self. Our ego is helpful in our early life, essential actually. We must develop a strong sense of self or ego to stake a claim for our place in the world.

However, the next step in our psychological development, after we become attached to that collection of beliefs about the self, is to let it go. This is not easy. Often, we do not want to let go of our ego. We are attached to it. It is us. To let go feels like we are letting our self down. This thought in and of itself can cause years of reactive responses.

Yet, letting go of the ego is a sign of maturity. It initiates our growth into a new phase of development where we can bring our gifts purely in service of something bigger than the self.

Curious who might be leading your show: the ego or the more mature self in service to the more than human world? Invite perspective. These are some of our favorite questions to live into. Who is the person we want to be? What help do you need to feel supported on that path?

Come wrestle angels with us.

The Man Watching (wrestling angels) by Rilke.docx

Understanding Triangulation: Gossip in Organizations

Issue – Triangulation aka Gossip

Triangulation is the discharge of relational discomfort/disruption/energy with one person through conversation with someone else.

Male Colleagues Whispering Behind Back Of Unhappy White Business Lady In Office. 

Client Story

A leader I work with has an open-door policy in their organization. The leader is open to other people’s opinions of their or the staff’s actions. People in the organization take advantage of this policy. People feel safe with the leader. The leader works hard to see people’s perspectives.

During these conversations with the staff, the leader listens and paraphrases – repeats back what they had heard. Shares their understanding of the issue. Offers a resolution – which is sometimes just a listening ear. People leave the office feeling heard and cared for.

Being open to feedback was a tough practice for the leader. It was uncomfortable to hear these opinions. They felt defensive but knew to hold back this response and keep listening. They worked hard to create a healthy workplace. It hurt to hear what was wrong, but it was essential to their overall goal. When the conversations ended, they had a lot of unsaid responses and hidden discomfort.

To release these thoughts and feelings, they talked to a peer in confidence about others. The peer would listen and validate the leader. Both would leave the conversation feeling connected. The peer felt like a confidant and friend. The leader felt seen for their value.

This arrangement felt safe. It allowed the leader to maintain a calm demeanor with staff and not disrupt the relationships. They avoided the conflict of different perspectives.

This practice had consequences. The peer felt superior to others because of their role as confidant to the leader. They had inside knowledge about others. This knowledge changed the way they saw people. This knowledge felt powerful. This power over others was felt by the staff.

Over time, the leader heard feedback that is was hard for the staff to connect with the peer. The staff felt talked down to by the peer. People started to alienate the peer in ways that created silos. Work became harder and people often kept their challenges close to them as they were uncertain of who to trust. The leader was able to maintain their image and power at the expense of the peer.

Through coaching, the leader realized they needed to stop discharging their relational discomfort with their peer. It clouded the peer’s opinion of others and eroded their reputation. It disrupted workflow and created silos. The leader needed a new solution to deal with their discomfort.

Identify – Triangulation

This story is about a common organizational challenge called triangulation. Triangulation is the discharge of relational discomfort/disruption/energy with one person through conversation with someone else.

Triangulation is a common, destructive, and often unconscious organizational strategy to manage the discomfort of conflict. It relieves interpersonal distress and eliminates the need for follow-up. This creates relief and connection for some and alienation and disconnection for others.

Triangulation is also called gossip. People are not informed they will be talked about. They are talked about behind their back. This “off-the-record” conversation negatively shapes the opinions of others. It increases factions and silos and creates and us and them relationship. It prevents work from being smoothly completed. It feels like but is not real connection. It decreases overt conflict and increases hiding and going around peoples back.

We triangulate in an organizational setting for a few reasons:

• It is a practice. It feels right, because it is what we were taught and have always done. We justify the practice by saying we are trying to work something out or share best practices.
• Conflict is hard and scary. We were never taught how have a constructive conversation about our differences.
• Time is short. We choose the quick fix of discharge over the long haul of conflict. We often feel so much better after we triangulate that we forget or choose not to circle back with the person who disrupted us.

Triangulation happens in all systems. It keeps problems under the surface where they get more complex. It eventually entangles the entire organization in a web of mistrust and misunderstanding that is hard but not impossible to unravel. It requires some serious communication skill building to navigate this complex challenge.

Triangulation can be an effective conversational strategy to see a situation from multiple perspectives. Effective triangulation is overt and explicit. People agree to others sharing their opinion to forward the issue. As a group, a team creates guidelines for these conversations that everyone follows. Individuals are taught how to engage and are supported in conflict. People have permission to disagree with others. People do not hold grudges.

Notice – Triangulation

To notice triangulation in your organization, start with yourself. Get curious about you, your filters, and your patterns in relationship. Look at your family system. Notice how they deal with conflict or disruptive relationships. This is likely your go to pattern as well.

Notice who challenges you. Name what bothers you about them. When you are bothered by someone in a way that you cannot resolve, what do you do?

If you find yourself in conversation with another person about someone else, notice if you feel relieved about the situation when you are done talking. Notice if you are uncomfortable in the conversation. What creates the discomfort?

Notice who are your go to people. Usually, they are people who agree with you. This feeds your perspective and keeps you safe.

Apply skills – Triangulation

Most of us triangulate. If you find yourself in conversation with another person about someone else, name it. “I am triangulating.” This builds accountability and trust. People recognize you as self-aware. Self-awareness – understanding that you have in impact on the system – helps people feel safe with you. When people feel safe, they do their best work.

Most people do not know they triangulate. If someone else comes to you to talk about another, set a boundary in the conversation. Share with them, “Ah, this is triangulation. I am happy to listen. Here are my criteria: you take accountability for your part, speak about you and your issues – not the other person, and go talk to this person about this issue when we are done.” You may find people either come to you more or they never return.

Triangulation is helpful if you intend to get perspective and then close the loop. Find a person you trust will be honest with you and not gossip about the other. Ask them to be an objective listener. Tell them, “I am having a problem with …. Can you listen to me so I can sort out my feelings and needs?” Tell them how to listen, “Help me take accountability for my role in this situation. When I start speaking about the other person, redirect me back to how I feel and what I need.  Here is how to hold me accountable to have the conversation.” Name by when you will close the loop and  report back to them.

To engage in healthy triangulation – like in the above research example – all people are aware of and agree to the practice for the purpose of learning. All create and explicitly follow predetermined guidelines. There is a structure to the conversations. You reflect and are accountable for your contribution to the problem. You share your challenges, not the faults of the other. You do not blame the other. You are specific in your ask of the listener. And, you close the loop – you go back to the person with whom you are troubled by and use what you gained through triangulating to resolve or evolve the issue.

To learn more, invite perspective. This is our jam. If you want to advance as a leader, get ahead of triangulation and learn how to have productive conflict.

Understanding Conflict Management Styles in Leadership

Learned and often unconscious behaviors to manage conflict.

Client Story

A busy school administrator preferred to move quickly through challenges. She felt confident moving fast was possible, though others were more cautious. In the school, there was a conflict about how to handle disruptive students. To address the needs of the students, parents, and teachers, she entered into conversations with the people affected and those who wanted to be in conversation about the disruption.

Conflict was not her strong suit. She had engaged in coaching to develop her competency in a conflict. Before the coaching, she would have gathered data from a few people and made a decision, informing her team, but not necessarily including them. She had received feedback that her style was exclusionary and wanted to change that impact.

She saw this issue as the perfect time to practice other conflict modes. With parents, she accommodated their perspectives, listening, and asking questions. With teachers, she advocated for what she believed and invited dialogue about the impact of her ideas. With students, she challenged their ideas about disruption and its impact on other students and teachers. She avoided making a decision for longer than made her comfortable.

Through her effort, she created a solution where all people felt heard and understood why she settled on the rules and consequences she chose. She and others understood the results involved a compromise of some of their needs but felt together they arrived at the best option.

Identify

People manage conflict differently. In our family, there are two people who move toward conflict head-on, directly, and thrive on the energy generated. The other two prefer to avoid conflict to preserve energy and only move toward conflict when necessary.

The variables that influence your conflict styles are wide. You are influenced by your family system, culture, gender norms, your individual predispositions, your learned behavior, or simply your mood that day.

Conflict is a disrupted expectation between your interdependence on another and your differences in approach. Conflict becomes harder to manage when something is at stake for us. With mountain adventure, an International Mountain Guide friend says there are three types of fun. Type one fun is fun the entire time. Type two fun is not fun in the moment but is fun after the danger has passed. Type three fun is never fun – even in your memories.

I like to think of conflict being similar to this. Type one conflict is easy to manage. Conversation is easy. People listen to each other. Needs are met and resolution is found.

Type two conflict is hard in the moment. We feel sad, mad, and afraid. We misunderstand each other and work diligently to hear the other person and stay in the conflict to be heard. Eventually, out of mutual respect, we evolve our understanding of each other and the issue.

Type three conflict is painfully hard and often hurtful. It takes a long time to or never resolves. This is the conflict we remember our whole lives. Sometimes through massive effort, change, and a deep understanding of our and others humanness we come to an evolution of the issue. Maybe we agree to disagree. Or find some common ground. This type of conflict is life altering and not always for the best.

Within each of these distinctions, we all have a style: a way we manage conflict that has mostly worked for us. When we feel safe and conflict is type one, we choose between styles. In type two conflict, our style begins to dictate what we do and how we do it. In type three conflict, we are in full-on react mode. We have little choice in our conflict style and act out of our automatic, habitual, and practiced responses to conflict.

There are many tools to decipher leadership and conflict styles. One tool is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Assessment – or TKI based on The Managerial Grid model (1964) by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton The TKI was developed in 1974 by Ken Thomas, PhD and Ralph Kilmann, PhD – both professors of management at the University of Pittsburgh.

Managerial Grid (1964) by Blake and Mouton

In the TKI, there are five conflict modes. No conflict mode is better than another. They all have their challenges and gifts.

The conflict modes are mapped on axes like the Managerial Grid. Instead of concern for the people and concern for results, the two constants are cooperativeness and assertiveness. These are on a continuum beginning at low where the corners meet to high. The conflict mode instrument, through asking a variety of either-or questions, gauges your most natural responses to conflict.

We all have conflict modes we use frequently and those that we underuse. Taking the TKI assessment, as the client above, provides us with an understanding of our strengths and challenges in conflict. It also identifies skills to practice and automatic behaviors to question.

Each style has benefits and challenges. Awareness of your default style allows you to notice it in action and consciously choose that style or try another. As you understand the intricacies of each style, you recognize them in others. This allows you to morph your go to style to meet or speak into the needs of others.

It bears repeating, no one style is better than another. Even though Competing is in the upper left corner – the area where Westerner’s eye is drawn to begin to read a sentence – it does not mean that the Compete mode triumphs over the other styles. The Accommodating style in the lower right is not the worst style or less than other styles. The key is to understand the benefits and challenges of each style to use them appropriately.

Conflict Modes*

Accommodate

The accommodating style is unassertive and cooperative. The skill of accommodating helps people feel settled. Unassertive means you make space for other people’s opinions. Unassertive means you do not need to win to feel satisfied. That all people’s needs are met is more fulfilling to this style than winning.

This style is challenged to get their needs met. They often sacrifice their needs for the needs of others. As a leader, this style provides space for others perspectives. This style wants people to feel included. If people prefer a more direct and rigid style, people may feel untethered and unsupported.

• Perception of conflict: a social/emotional issue to be settled with support and sensitivity
• Perception of teammates: valued colleagues – people to be supported and looked after
• Guiding principle: belief in the Golden Rule (“Do unto others…”)
• Values: support, generosity, goodwill, team cohesiveness

Avoid

The avoiding style is unassertive and uncooperative. The skill of avoiding gives people space to think about an issue. Sometimes this is enough to evolve or resolve the conflict. Uncooperative means they do not bother people with unnecessary conversations. They will not talk your ear off nor will they use your time with what they perceive to be irrelevant issues.

This style’s challenge is allowing conflict to go on without resolution. It often builds the pressure of the conflict in an unproductive way. These people often do not share their needs with others. As leaders, they hope people have the skills to manage themselves. If people who work for avoiders have higher needs in connection, they may feel dismissed by their boss. Avoiders may not set strict enough guidelines for employee behavior.

• Perception of conflict: a disruption that diverts energy from work and can cause unnecessary stress
• Perception of teammates: potential time sinks when conflicts arise
• Guiding principle: belief in using time wisely – only on important issues and only when conditions are right
• Values: conserve personal time and energy, be prudent and prepared, keep meetings short

Compete

The compete style is assertive and uncooperative. The skill of a compete style is the ability to be assertive enough to have your voice heard. This person does not fear stepping out into a crowd to share their opinion. Nor do they fear being wrong or having others contradict them. They seem confident. As if they will not back down. For this style to feel settled, they actually need to be met with challenge. If they are not met with an equal amount of energy, they will likely continue to make their point.

This styles challenge is being cooperative and listening to others to hear their voices. Because people do not challenge them, they often feel their perspective is the right one. If this happens enough over time, they begin to believe they are regularly right. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The people that work for them may feel bulldozed.

• Perception of conflict: a contest between opposing positions and the people who hold them
• Perception of teammates: opponents, if their views differ on an issue
• Guiding principle: belief in one’s position – and use of tough-minded candor to challenge opposing positions
• Values: tough-mindedness, candor, have the courage of one’s convictions, make things happen

Collaborate

The collaborate style is assertive and cooperative. The skill of a collaborator is the ability to stay in a conversation long enough for others to feel heard and be assertive enough to have your point heard. Collaborators tend to be skillful in conflicts because they are persistent and incorporate many different people’s perspectives.

This styles challenge is they take a lot of time to build their case. They are thorough to a fault. Because of their thoroughness, people learn not to challenge them. They likely have a reason for not taking the advice. People that work for them worry about the amount of time spent to gather opinions, build consensus, and make decisions.

• Perception of conflict: a problem to be solved
• Perception of teammates: allies to enlist in finding a creative solution
• Guiding principle: belief in the power of consensus – and in sharing information and understandings
• Values: innovation, open-mindedness, learning, consensus, win-win solutions

Compromise

The compromise style is in between assertive and unassertive, cooperative and uncooperative. This style makes quick decisions. Compromisers like to gather information from some people, make an assumption of other’s perspectives from the baseline of the small sample group, and come to a decision that meets most people’s needs. They assert themselves to limit time spent.

This styles challenge is that some people often do not feel represented or valued when the decision is made. They feel consulted but not included. People who work for this style feel startled at the quickness of decisions and often don’t feel bought in.

• Perception of conflict: a negotiation to find a middle-ground settlement
• Perception of teammates: amicable negotiating partners
• Guiding principle: belief in pragmatism – being reasonable about what is possible in a situation
• Values: moderation, pragmatism, reciprocity, exchange

Notice

At your next meeting, note those with different decision-making styles. Decision style and conflict go hand-and-hand. When the people you observe decide, do they avoid conflict or engage with it?

Notice if people feel supportive and excited about the decision or if they seem checked out.

Notice who comes to the meeting with a lot of information or who wants to get more people involved to really understand the issue.

Notice who avoids meetings, conversations, or debate.

Notice these behaviors and your response to them. We have a conflict style. There are some conflict styles that bugs us. Sometimes the style that bugs us is our own style. As we experience our style in other people, what we see reflects our own challenges.

Notice when you justify your style. For example, an avoider would say it feels right to let that one go. A compete would say it was right to seek the wint. Notice what is at stake for you in these situations, who is included, and excluded, and the impact this has on group dyanmics.

Explore

Explore what it is like to take on a new conflict style. Whichever styles you identify as, take on the guiding principle of another type. This will likely be uncomfortable. Notice what you feel and sense. Notice what is ok and not ok for you from this alternate perspective. Notice the impact you have on yourself or other people. Share the data you collect with a trusted colleague or coach and find ways to sustainably try new behaviors and learn from the results.

Apply

Take this lens to your home, work, or community life. Notice people in conflict outside of work. Try to identify their style.

Tell your partner or friends about conflict styles. Guess each other’s style. The more you practice noticing, exploring, and applying these conflict styles, the more you learn about yourself and can more productively engage with others.

*Content in part comes from the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument report.

Building Impactful Leadership Through Values

Client Story

A client started a construction company. This company set out to change the way construction was done in Seattle. They wanted to create an intersection between construction, banking, and social and environmental impact.

This client – a white man – wanted to use his life for good. In his early life, he had witnessed the discrepancy between wealth and poverty in the difference between his divorced parents’ lifestyles. He traveled to Fiji to help rural communities build homes. Then, to Africa to work in the Peace Corps. He was startled at the lack of access to resources in both places. In Africa, the beautiful virgin forests around where he volunteered were being torn down by companies with no affiliation with those who used the forests for food, fuel, and other resources. These companies took the wood and the money and left the community with nothing.

The utter disregard for the local community was deeply disturbing to him. At this point, he had worked in banking and construction. His partner opened his eyes to the social inequity in their hometown of Seattle. He knew he did not want to work for the money but toward equity in housing – a primary human need and using resources efficiently. He built a company to forward that mission.

Identify

A leader as described by Brené Brown is anyone who takes responsibility to find the potential in people and processes and has the courage to develop that potential. This definition marries well with McCarthy Rekart’s chosen definition of leadership as a process of social influence where one person enlists the aid and support of another in the accomplishment of a common task.[1]

As Dr. Brown states in her books, real leadership is tough. Real leadership requires becoming aware of your intention and the consequences of your choices. It means continually and choicefully stepping outside of your comfort zone. This develops a knowledge of your habit patterns of thought, mood, and action and how those impact people and groups around you.

Leading is tough when you are establishing yourself as a leader. But it gets even harder when you achieve levels of leadership in the form of promotions, appointments, and titles.

As a leader, you are given the privilege of guiding people: stakeholders, employees, and customers. You come to the job heartfelt about the struggles of the people. You want to do good by your stakeholders. You are driven to serve the customer. These three groups each have their own needs.

Serious Asian female doctor showing crossed hands.

Their needs are often at odds with each other. For example, a customer wants stellar service at a low price. A stakeholder wants the leader to run a “tight ship” – a fiscally responsible organization, committed, professional employees, and satisfied customers. Their pride and care for their effort drive the need for the organization to serve as an example for others. The employees want to be compensated for their efforts in ways that change from generation to generation including being seen for their contribution, being given ways to increase their skills, and financial incentives to support their family and position in society. These three needs draw a leader’s attention and are often in opposition to each other. 

Leaders who anchor on their values and line those up to the values, mission, and vision of the organization provide stability for those who work with them. Your values are mooring regardless of how each group unconsciously or consciously tries to pull you to put their needs above others.

Defining your values and living them is a big task. Far bigger than you think. To live your values means you uphold them in the face of being disliked, dismissed, put down, talked about, and unpopular. No wonder leaders pay lip service to values and then choose when to uphold them. You need an incredible amount of inner knowledge and strength to actually live your values.

As a leader, you are responsible for standing for your values and upholding the vision, mission, and values of the organization. You become the uncomfortable point person between your values and the people and organization.

You see the potential of the organization. You want to add value for the stakeholders. You hope to support the employees. You apply your values. Then you uphold those values even in the face of disagreement, unhappiness, and conflict. Being a leader means you have explicit and productive conflict with others. If you are not in active conversations about differences, you are likely not living your values.

Conflict means that you or another person has a disrupted expectation.[2] Conflict is an interpersonal gap. I have a certain set of values that are guaranteed to be different than yours because we grew up in different homes and locations and with different friend bases and experiences. An interpersonal gap requires conversation. A conversation anchored in your values not as armor but as a curiosity that inquires or supports others to uncover and understand the differences in your baseline values.

A leader who actively lives their values encounters and generates disrupted expectations. When you know your values, it gives you a platform and a backstop in the face of challenge, disrupted expectations, and confusion.

My client’s values are contribution and empathy. He has been living his values since the founding of the company. The values make his job hard. He questions his motives daily and what best serves not only his people – stakeholders, staff, and customers, but what serves the invisible customer – those people and things that have been culturally disposable to show growth.

This means that each year the company examines its mission, vision, and values. The organization began in 2009. Guided by the leaders’ values, in 10-plus years of running this business, the organization has changed direction to live into its evolving values.

This leader being anchored in his values, has drawn people that want to work for a mission, vision, and values-driven leader and organization. People in the company feel valued which leads to less attrition and a deeply and personally committed workforce.

Notice

A leader’s job is to take thoughtful action. Chris Argyris and Donald Schon[3] note that few people are aware of the structures in their mind that guide their actions – their values. These structures are your espoused values – the values you speak, and your values-in-action – the actions you take.

Espoused values are always noble. It is how you hope and what you aspire to be. You see and interpret your actions through the filters of these values. Your espoused values are your intention.

You also have values-in-action. These are your behaviors in daily life. Your values-in-action are your impact on others.

Espoused values and values-in-action are like two different departments that often operate independently from each other. Most leaders are unaware of their values-in-action and how they impact others. Even fewer understand that unless espoused values are a conscious practice, you will sacrifice them in service of your internal comfort. This happens below your level of consciousness. You feel better in the short term but lack congruence with your values in the long term.

For example, my values are dignity and wholeheartedness. I see and interpret my actions through these values. They represent my intention. They are what I espouse.

My values-in-action are the behaviors I exhibit when I apply these values. When I take a stand for myself or another – especially those who have no voice, that is dignity in action. When I tear up when someone speaks the truth about their experience, that is being wholehearted – I allow myself to be impacted by people’s stories. I keep my heart open.

Incongruence is when my action does not display values. My value for dignity means I stand up for others and am against injustice even when it is uncomfortable, dangerous, or a social risk. I expect myself to uphold the dignity of others when these situations occur. But unless I name behaviors that help me live into my values and practice these in action, I will miss opportunities when they arise.

A few years ago, I missed an opportunity to live into my values. My daughter and I were on Nantucket for my husband’s, brother’s wedding. My daughter needed shoes for her dress. We went to a local shop to see what they had.

The sales clerks – two black women – helped us find some shoes. I paid and was leaving the shop. My daughter got distracted by some clothing. I waited at the door. An older woman entered the shop. She called out, “Girl!” in a sharp, harsh tone. My daughter looked up at her startled. The older woman was looking at the black women. I stood there with my mouth open as she said, “Girl!” two more times. I was startled.  I felt bad for the women in the shop. I was shocked that a person would treat another this way. I stood and didn’t do or say anything as my daughter met me at the door, and we left.

As my startle wore off, I turned to my daughter and checked in.

“Did you hear that?”

My daughter said, “Yes. I thought she was talking to me as I was the only girl.”

I responded, “No. She was talking to the black women.”

I told her that is often what white people called black people in the olden days – not so old in Nantucket, I guess. I said this is not how our family treats people. And, it would have been more amazing to live this value in action at that moment. I told her I felt ashamed for not saying something. My values in action – stay safe, did not match my espoused value of dignity. My two departments were not aligned.

I replay this example over and over in my mind. I feel guilty for my lack of value congruence. I remember the example to remind myself to make a new choice the next time I encounter someone undermining the dignity of another.

My espoused values created dissonance and discomfort in my body that showed up as a freeze-and-move-away response. The feeling settled when I left the building. I came to my senses. But the impact remains. I was not practiced enough to choose to stand for dignity at that time.

As you move through your day, notice what action you take when you feel something is at stake for you. First, notice what is at stake – your reputation, opinion, safety, position, or something else you value. Reflect on what action you took and why. Note how the action you took felt right or normal, even if it was still uncomfortable.

Notice the impact of your action. If your behavior did not have the impact you intended, inquire about this using active listening skills and working to see the other person’s perspective. You may want to be a well-loved and honorable leader. You want to meet the needs of your people to gain their respect. To do this, you let certain behaviors slide or not have conversations with people to remain respected. This is normal. Through reflection and inquiry, you become more conscious of your intention and impact and make a new choice.

Explore

Explore your values-in-action and your espoused values through conversation with people who know you. Ask them what values they think you uphold. Have them tell you a story about when you upheld this value. Reflect to see if their story tells the same story you have about your values. If it does, you are likely congruent. Your path will be easier.

In your exploration, if you hear values that are different than what you espouse, breathe. This difference often generates defensive or reactive behavior. Return to your breath again and again until you see their perspective. Share the values you espouse. Paraphrase what you heard about your values-in-action. Reflect to understand how your values intersect to create the incongruence.

My client’s values were empathy and contribution. He knew and lived these values every day. Each day he checked his actions against his values. When he realized he talked over people at a meeting or ignored the homeless population around his organization, he would pause and reflect. He took time to align his actions with his values. Through this action, he was congruent. People trusted him. They had faith that if he changed the business direction it was for a good reason. They shouldered the discomfort because of the trust the leader built through his congruence.

Apply

Every day you are called to live your values. When you name your values and reflect on your behaviors, people experience you as congruent and trust you more.

These values become the foundation of your work. People have different values. Knowledge of your values allows you to share them with others. Your values-in-action behaviors provide a tangible data point. You can ask for feedback about your values from people you trust. This builds vulnerability and accountability to live into your values.

Embedded in my values of dignity and wholeheartedness are other values. These are how I behave. From the list of values, choose two that are your most important. In the process of choosing two, you circle many. When you choose two and explore them, you find that the others you circled are often HOW you live your values.

Circle as many values as resonate. Reduce your list until you have two. It may take some time to figure out what they are.

Achievement	Ethics	Justice	Safety
Accomplishment	Excellence	Kindness	Security
Adaptability	Fairness	Knowledge	Self-awareness
Adventure	Faith	Leadership	Self-discipline
Ambition	Family	Learning	Self-expression
Authenticity	Financial Stability	Legacy	Self-respect
Balance	Forgiveness	Leisure	Serenity
Beauty	Freedom	Liberation	Service
Belonging	Friendship	Love	Simplicity
Career	Fun	Loyalty	Spirituality
Caring	Future generations	Making a difference	Sports-person-ship
Collaboration	Generosity	Nature	Stewardship
Community	Giving Back	Openness	Success
Compassion	Grace	Optimism	Teamwork
Competence	Gratitude	Order	Thrift
Confidence	Growth	Parenting	Time
Connection	Harmony	Patience	Tradition
Contribution	Health	Patriotism	Travel
Cooperation	Home	Peace	Trust
Creativity	Honesty	Perseverance	Truth
Curiosity	Humility	Personal fulfillment	Understanding
Dignity	Humor	Power	Uniqueness
Decisiveness	Inclusion	Pride	Usefulness
Diversity	Independence	Recognition	Vision
Depth	Initiative	Reliability	Vulnerability
Environment	Integrity	Resourcefulness	Wealth
Efficiency	Intuition	Respect	Well-being
Equality	Job security	Responsibility	Wholeheartedness
Equity	Joy	Risk-taking	Wisdom

“If you have more than three principles, you have no priorities.” Jim Collins, Good to Great.

Once you choose, define what those words mean behaviorally – what you do or will do to uphold that value. This is where the values create the power for you to live into your potential. Knowing your values holds you accountable for your actions.

Apply these values daily. Speak your values when you work with others. For example, I have a value for dignity. When I work with teams and organizations, I espouse that I uphold the dignity of others. As a coach, sometimes I must call someone out. This is hard. I worry they will feel less than or ashamed. Yet, if I am to live into my values, I open my heart and bring attention to their behavior. Hopefully, they feel the love.

I build dignity through small group interaction. Individuals get to know each other as humans with faults and successes. This experience forms tight bonds between people. These bonds mean they take a stand for each other and each person’s value – this is dignity in action.

This support encourages others. The practice of standing for dignity in organizations builds a brave work culture. It gives people permission and skills to stand up for themselves and others. This builds connection – people feel they belong, leads to less attrition – people feel seen, and more committed employees – people feel valued.

When you start to apply your values, you must stay aware of two things: empathy and self-compassion. Empathy, according to Dr. Brown, is essential to your success. You receive empathy from people. These people know and support your efforts to put your values into action. This is hard work. Support is paramount.

The next is self-compassion. You engage your mental and internal observer. The observer notices your successes, names and learns from your failures, and celebrates your progress.

Here are some self-reflection questions that help you live your values in the world[4]:

• Who is someone that knows and supports your efforts to live into your values?
  • Name one or two people.
• What does support from this person look like?
  • What do they say or do to support you?
• What can you do as an act of self-compassion to support yourself in the hard work of living into your values?
  • What are your self-care practices?
  • How do you celebrate your success?
• What are the early warning indicators that you’re living outside your values?
  • Do you become resentful? Agitated? Angry? Do you check-out?
• What does it feel like when you are living into your values?
  • Name the sensation in your body. This strengthens neural pathways.
• How does living into your two key values shape the way you give and receive feedback?
  •  Listening to feedback through the lens of your values does what to your reactivity? Your perception of self? Others?

When I think about living into my values, I assume decisions would be easier. But they are not. They are harder. The values force me to choose in ways that I could get around before. For example, I have a friend who is dying of cancer. I have been meaning to get to her house for months. I can easily justify why I can’t make it – work, kids, life – but really, I am sidestepping my value of wholeheartedness in service of my ease and comfort. I want to support her. I have not made the time. I feel uncomfortable and therefore make legitimate excuses for my inaccessibility.

While writing this chapter, I called myself into action and signed up to spend half a day with her. Love is time and attention. I will spend my time and give her my attention. I hope she will feel the love.

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[1] Chemers, M. (1997) An Integrative Theory of Leadership. Oxford: Routledge.

[2] Kevin Bush, Teams and Leaders (2003).

[3] Argyris, C. and Shon, D. (1974) Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

[4] Brown, B. (2018). Dare to Lead. New York: Random House. pg. 196

Follow the Recipe – Practicing the Mush Separator

The Mush Separator is a process to sort out complex subjects and conversations where you or others feel defensive, overwhelmed, or confused.

The Mush Separator breaks the conversation down into parts to distinguish what is confusing, overwhelming, or produces a defensive reaction AND to understand yourself and others more clearly.

The Mush Separator was adapted from the Awareness Wheel by Drs. Sherod and Phyllis Miller, Elam Nunnally, and Daniel Wackman from the University of Minnesota Family Study Center. This tool is used to aid in clear and healthy talking and listening. We took the original wheel model and created a linear form. This helps people distinguish the best way to move through the model for the most effective results in business. Linearly using the model produces a conversation. Once you have moved through the model, you invite the response of the other. You can go through as many rounds as needed to gain understanding.

Using the Mush Separator is effective for digesting your experience. You populate the tool with details of your experience to become clear about why you feel disrupted and learn from your own inner wisdom how you might respond. Using the tool to digest your own experience is what you will practice below.

This tool is also used in conversation with others to provide a guide for sharing what disrupted you, how you feel, what you think, your intention, and the action you desire. You use the tool to tell your story and listen to the story of another. They use the tool to break down what you are sharing with them to make sure they understand you.  It provides a map to follow as you navigate the sometimes dangerous terrain of interpersonal misunderstanding.

Once mastered, you can use the Mush Separator to listen to the experience of another and place what they say into distinct categories, thereby becoming clear about what someone is telling you. You can then re-play what you heard to them, often assisting them in becoming clearer about what they are saying.

The following is a method I offer my clients to practice the mush separator with various events before using it live with another person.

Data

Always begin with the data points. Data is something a video camera or a microphone would pick up or something you read. When asked what data disrupted them, most people share their opinions, perceptions, judgments, and beliefs about the data but not the data itself. It could sound like this:

• They are angry.
• They are blaming me.
• They don’t know the full story.

While these statements may be true, some data led to these statements. The data itself is critical. Without the data, your statements will likely generate a defensive reaction in yourself or others.

Data is strictly the facts. For practice, on a sheet of paper, write down the facts. It will look like this:

• My Team’s record shows that we began the meeting at 3:31 pm on 12/12/ 23.
• Sam started the meeting by sharing the agenda on Teams.
• You asked if Sam could make the font larger.
• Sam shared the first agenda item, which was the budget forecast for 2024.
• I asked to share my screen.
• You asked me why the forecast was not shared in advance.
• I said because some numbers came in at 7am this morning and I wanted to make sure they were correct before I sent anything out which took me until 2 pm.
• You said this is unacceptable and waved your hand across the video screen.

These are all facts that others could confirm if the meeting was recorded.

Feeling and Thoughts

For the practice, to understand the flow of the tool, I have people attach a feeling and thought to each data point. I have them use the following formula:

I feel/felt [insert a feeling]_____ that [insert a one-sentence thought] _____.

The feelings you are allowed to use are: Mad, Sad, Glad, and Afraid. Once you master saying and using these feelings, which can be hard for some – especially mad and afraid, you can move on to others.

Here is what the practice would look like for the above facts:

• My Team’s record shows that we began the meeting at 3:31 pm on 12/12/ 23.
  • I felt GLAD that our meeting began close to on time.
• Sam started the meeting by sharing the agenda on Teams.
  • I felt GLAD that Sam had an agenda.
• You asked if Sam could make the font larger.
  • I felt GLAD that we could make the font and picture larger.
• Sam shared the first agenda item, which was the budget forecast for 2024.
  • I felt AFRAID that the first item was the budget forecast as I had a sense my delay in sending it out would cause a stir.
• I asked to share my screen.
  • I felt GLAD that we can switch screen sharing.
• You asked me why the forecast was not shared in advance.
  • I felt MAD that you did not first acknowledge all the work that went into the budgeting process.
• I said because some numbers came in at 7am this morning and I wanted to make sure they were correct before I sent anything out which took me until 2 pm.
  • I felt SAD that people did not respect the deadline of last Tuesday and instead asked me to revise their work this morning.
• You said this is unacceptable and waved your hand across the video screen.
  • I felt MAD that you called me out in front of the group.
  • I felt MAD that you did not call out those who were late as well.
  • I felt GLAD that we could speak our perspectives at meetings without needing to take them offline.  
  • I felt AFRAID that others would think less of me because of this situation.

Continue writing until you feel the reaction subsiding. Continue until you can see the other person’s point of view. If they are still all wrong in your mind when you finish the practice, keep going until you begin to understand why they did what they did. Then, sit with what you learn.

Intention

The intention is your positive intention to share this conversation with them. It might look like:

• My intention (desire, motivation, hope, or need) with sharing this is to let you know I wanted to share the budget forecast ahead of time and couldn’t because I chose to be accurate over timely.

This is your opportunity to share more about your why. In this case, it was to be accurate instead of timely. Your why is always noble.

Wanted Action

Wanted action is your request for the other party. In this case, you may ask them to share their feedback after the meeting. You could let them know that you would appreciate their understanding when data comes in last minute and you must shift the plan. You may also add, that you could have let them know that you were not going to send the budget out ahead of the meeting, that you know they prefer to look at it before it is revealed, and then apologize, and say you will do better next time.

This latter line happens through the Mush Separator process. You understand their point of view more and can front-load your response with a solution for next time. This lets the other person know that you are thinking about the whole, not just your part.

Remember, relationships – all of them – are always co-created. This means no one person is to blame and not one person is responsible. Using the mush separator practice increases your emotional intelligence and builds the skills for effective leadership. The key is to practice.

If you need more support, please reach out. May this be of benefit.

Develop

On our website – McCarthy Rekart, we name three words integral to the work we do – develop, integrate, and evolve. Neil speaks about them here. I share our “how” on development below.

The angle we take on development is experiential. We build experiences for you to encounter challenges – you practice skills in real-time with your peers – this always feels awkward! We create opportunities for intimate conversations – about your predispositions (filters), reactivity, and gifts. These conversations bring relief, you are not alone. In real-time, using the skills we teach, we question your perceptions in front of your peers which shifts your perceptions or generates reactivity! We work with what transpires! You either auger into your truth as the truth or fundamentally change how you see yourself and others – develop the capacity to see the real truth. This latter form of development manifests generative outcomes the former creates disappointment and eventually regret.

The more we can catch you in the act of responding or even reacting – at your team meeting or in our leadership development programs – and offer a factual view of what we saw – they said or did this, and you said or did that – the clearer you become about how you impact others. Once you see, you cannot unsee without an extraordinary amount of denial. To develop literally means to come out (de) of the (wrap) envelope.

It is essential to form envelopes with your thinking. All people have envelopes. These invisible structures located in your body and in your brain help you decipher information quickly. These practiced envelopes produce predetermined responses – I like or trust this, I don’t like or don’t trust that. Because of these envelopes, your predetermined judgments happen in milliseconds – that is really fast. They feel like the truth, but they are only YOUR truth – NOT THE TRUTH.

You create envelopes that align with your education, history, societal influences, where you grew up and how, and the institutions that formed you. This forms YOUR basic truths about people and experiences. Yet, as I said above, and it bears repeating, this is only your truth, not the truth. The truth is a combination of your experience and the experience of another or others. No single story holds the truth – ever.

Eventually, hopefully, sooner rather than later, you encounter a moment where the magnitude of your response – often a reaction – does not match the event. You double down on your truth to the detriment of the outcome or person. You create disruption and feel vindicated in your response (read reaction). Regretfully, you may have to experience many of these situations to begin to see and eventually develop – come out of your envelope.

This, as Neil said in his article, is the place where you hope whatever you learned in that leadership development class becomes accessible to you and you glide through the situation regarded for your skillfulness. How I wish skills could be learned through reading about them….

This miracle – reading about a skill and then successfully applying it – rarely happens without practice. And, without collecting a lot of regrets, practice is rarely a chosen next step. Regret only emerges when your justifications for your behavior become unbelievable even to you. If you are feeling regret for your behavior in past events, you have entered an optimal space for learning.

This is where we come in. We peddle awareness. The more we see you in action, the more we are able to support you to become the best version of yourself.

As we reflect your behavior like a video camera or a microphone, you see your impact more clearly. As you see yourself more clearly, you begin to wonder how people became so cool. You start to see people as they are instead of as you perceive them through your filters, judgments, perceptions, and opinions of them. This leads to a more settled nervous system, which provides you with more access to calm and less stress. This simple shift in the balance of stress and calm open pathways to being able to choose your response instead of reacting. You begin to develop.

You expand your capacity and notice where you become stuck and reactive. You sort out why – what about this generates reactivity? Together, we create the support you need to practice and try something new.

Development also requires integration – a steadfast practice of skills for an as-yet-unknown, but hoped-for generative outcome. It takes three hundred repetitions to achieve muscle memory, it takes 3,000 to achieve embodiment – you use a skill without feeling awkward, and it takes 10,00 reps to achieve mastery. Stay tuned as we support you to become a master.

Invite perspective. Start today. Let us support you to become the best version of yourself.