~Karen Horney, M.D. (1885 – 1952)

The Scene. The coaching discussions I have had lately, while virtual, have been some of the most meaningful of my career. Clients grapple with the immediacy of business, leadership, and humanitarian decisions that were unforeseen a mere 30-60 days ago: “How can I best balance business continuity against various forms of negative impact on individual wellbeing?” Or “How do I make these decisions without more data or experience in situations like this?” And “What should I be doing to lead myself and the people I care about through these uncertain times?” These compelling questions emerge and then continue to reverberate across multiple sessions.

Typical conversations go something like this:

Leader: “I feel like we’re past the initial stage of this crisis, when it was ‘all hands on deck.’  Now I see people caught between two worlds. The frenetic energy of the first stage is dropping. People are getting tired and cranky. It’s hard to keep them motivated.”

Me: “How do you see others behaving in this in-between place? And what are you feeling and doing?”

Leader: “Some people are still really wanting to stay in the high action mode, to stay in motion. I see them trying to create a dramatic kind of energy. So, I am trying to manage that, to make sure it stays effective. But I am also seeing other people drop off or not show up like I would expect them to. I am not sure where they’ve gone. And then I’m also seeing people who seem to need more contact with me, who are setting up lots of videoconferences and send update emails on relatively unimportant stuff that I don’t think are necessary…Overall, it’s just feeling hard and draining and negative.  But I’m trying to be patient and recognize we are all stuck in some sort of in-between period.”

Liminal space has been thrust upon us all.

Liminal Space, Revisited. What is liminal space? The Latin root, “limen,” is a noun that means threshold, border, or beginning. “Liminal,” the adjective form, has been defined as:

1. Relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process
2. Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold

The original term, coined in cultural anthropology circles, describes the time in a cultural or tribal ritual where an actual transformation is occurring (e.g. from child to adult). It has also been used in traditional storytelling and mythology to depict a particular phase in a hero or heroine’s journey. More recently, the concept has been adopted and broadened by Jungian psychologists, spiritualists, and others to represent potent spaces of transformation when an individual, group or culture is no longer in a previous state but is not yet in the new state; when old ways of being no longer work but the new ways have not yet emerged.

I introduced the concept of liminal space in a prior post.  I invite you to visit that post for a more thorough discussion of the roots of the term and general recommendations for leading in liminal space. This post focuses more on the very significant (and uncomfortable) experience of prolonged stress that is one of the defining characteristics of a liminal period.  Three coping strategies – common behavioral patterns with which we try to manage that stress – are outlined, along with a set of self- and leadership reflections.

All of this is offered from a belief that, while the pandemic form in which this liminal space has come is deeply unwelcome, it (“life itself,” as the opening quote suggests) serves up a rich, and in some measure, a redemptive, opportunity to grow.

Our Stressed Selves. Several years ago, the American Psychological Association reported the average stress level of a representative American sample as 5.1 on a 10-point scale.   The top five rated stressors (and the percent who rated each stressor as either “very” or “somewhat significant”) are:

• Money (67%)
• Work (65%)
• Family Responsibilities (54%)
• Personal Health (51%)
• Health Problems Affecting the Family and the Economy (tied at 50%)

Would a re-survey now find a significant increase in the average stress level, along with some of the stressors having flipped position on the list? I would guess the answer is “yes.” 

But don’t take my answer for it. Try a quick self-assessment:  on a scale of 1 (“little or no stress”) to 10 (“ a great deal of stress”), how would you rate your current level of stress in each of the six areas covered by the APA’s Stress in America survey?

____ Money

____ Work

____ Family Responsibilities

____ Personal Health

____ Health Problems Affecting My Family

____ The Economy

Now, how would your ratings have looked six, or even three, months ago?

Most of us are walking around these days in the midst of an elevated stress experience, largely created by having a collective experience of feeling tremendous uncertainty around important factors related to our perceived personal safety and well-being. This collective experience is eminently reasonable and understandable. So, what can we do, if anything, to get through this liminal experience with a little bit more ease? Or even, possibly, to emerge out the other side of it as a stronger version of the selves that entered into it?

This post will suggest one approach. Future posts will provide additional approaches.

Three Coping Strategies. The more forward-looking leadership teams and leaders I am in touch with have spent time discussing “stress behaviors” they are seeing among their team members and ways to understand those behaviors. They are also eager to understand and receive some support for their own tendencies under stress. The story I opened with is representative of leaders’ attempts to note and make sense of the individual differences that are showing up under prolonged stressful conditions.

We can view stress behaviors as clues, or outward manifestations, of our own and others’ underlying coping strategies. How do we best make sense of those clues? By looking for patterns among them.

Many stress behaviors fall into one of three types of energetic patterns, according to an influential body of thought pioneered by the humanistic psychoanalyst, Karen Horney, M.D. In brief, our attempts to cope with stress and, in longer-lasting states, anxiety, tend to fall along three dimensions:  we either move against people (in aggression or power-seeking behavior), we move away from people (in withdrawal or avoidance behavior), or we move toward people (in compliance or approval-seeking behavior).

Each of these energetic patterns can be viewed as having associated biologically-wired circuitry: fight (against) versus flight (away) versus tend-and-befriend (toward) instincts that have long served a purpose in the human animal. Thus, each pattern retains, at its core, a healthy, life-enhancing property: moving against is about assertiveness, moving away is about taking some distance to gain perspective, and moving toward is about cooperation.

We can, and probably do, use all three orientations across time and different situations. But many of us are likely to have an underlying predisposition toward one pattern, what Horney calls “those ways and means of coping with others in which the particular person feels most at home,” based on childhood/developmental experiences. We also tend to overuse, or return to this “home,” during times of stress.

What might each of these strategies look like in action, in work relationships and situations, during a stressful time? I’ve supplied some thumbnail descriptions below:

It is important to note that these descriptions are extremely high level. How you might exhibit “moving away” behavior, for example, could look very different from someone else you work with: you might become very intellectualized to mask how you actually feel about a “charged” work issue whereas a peer starts skipping videoconferences related to that issue.  What will be most similar is the psychological purpose it serves within both of you: to help you manage stress and/or to help you feel safer by creating either actual or psychological distance from the work issue.

How to Use This? So, how might you translate this model from concept to action?How might the framework help you as a leader and as a person encountering heightened stress? First, knowledge can be powerful. This triarchic model has legs. Many clients I’ve introduced to it have found it to be a useful lens through which to be curious about what they see in any number of situations:  from understanding their own or another person’s behavior over time, to forming a hypothesis about patterns in a team (e.g. what do you get when you lead a team in which half the members tend toward “move against” and the other half tend toward “move away” attitudes?)  Additionally, several personality and leadership assessments integrate Karen Horney’s three dimensions into their theoretical framework:  the Hogan Development Survey, the Leadership Circle Profile, and the Enneagram, to name a few. But you need not wait to get formal diagnostic data back. Generally, I find you can follow the behavioral clues to form a hypothesis and then test that hypothesis by seeing how useful it is as an explanatory vehicle for future behaviors.  Or, most powerfully, if you take action to proactively address the “solve for” part of the tendency in a healthier manner.

Second, if you are looking to use this system to increase self-awareness, it can be helpful to seek feedback from others with whom you are interacting during this stressful time. As James Hollis, Ph.D., a prolific author, and Jungian analyst, stated: “Self-awareness has nothing to do with intelligence or intention. It is hard to step outside your stuff and reflect upon it.” 

You might simply ask: “What are you noticing in the way I have been behaving over the last several weeks?”  Or, a little more leading question if you don’t net much from that first one: “Do you find me behaving in ways that are seeming to bring me closer to or farther away from you (or others)? How effective am I being in responding to various situations that arise?”

Third, you can work (or coach someone else) through the following set of self-reflections as a means of restoring your center of gravity, such that you are better able to pull from the strengths offered by your predisposed strategy while introducing more balance:

• How might I take a more assertive, direct approach to this situation? What would that look like?
• How might I take a more measured, objective approach to this situation? What would that look like?
• How might I take a more collaborative, conscientious approach to this situation? What would that look like?

Last, know that the following premise underlies this model:  once we move beyond these coping strategies, we touch our uniquely human inheritance as wholehearted beings.  I’ll close with another powerful quote from Karen Horney, from her perch as a mid-twentieth-century Neo-Freudian and early holistic practitioner: “The comprehensive formulation of [developmental] goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one’s feelings, one’s work, one’s beliefs.”

How much more wonderful might this period on earth be made if we were all creating more from wholeheartedness instead of from fear?

Recent Posts

“Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.”

~Karen Horney, M.D. (1885 – 1952)

The Scene. The coaching discussions I have had lately, while virtual, have been some of the most meaningful of my career. Clients grapple with the immediacy of business, leadership, and humanitarian decisions that were unforeseen a mere 30-60 days ago: “How can I best balance business continuity against various forms of negative impact on individual wellbeing?” Or “How do I make these decisions without more data or experience in situations like this?” And “What should I be doing to lead myself and the people I care about through these uncertain times?” These compelling questions emerge and then continue to reverberate across multiple sessions.

Typical conversations go something like this:

Leader: “I feel like we’re past the initial stage of this crisis, when it was ‘all hands on deck.’  Now I see people caught between two worlds. The frenetic energy of the first stage is dropping. People are getting tired and cranky. It’s hard to keep them motivated.”

Me: “How do you see others behaving in this in-between place? And what are you feeling and doing?”

Leader: “Some people are still really wanting to stay in the high action mode, to stay in motion. I see them trying to create a dramatic kind of energy. So, I am trying to manage that, to make sure it stays effective. But I am also seeing other people drop off or not show up like I would expect them to. I am not sure where they’ve gone. And then I’m also seeing people who seem to need more contact with me, who are setting up lots of videoconferences and send update emails on relatively unimportant stuff that I don’t think are necessary…Overall, it’s just feeling hard and draining and negative.  But I’m trying to be patient and recognize we are all stuck in some sort of in-between period.”

Liminal space has been thrust upon us all.

Liminal Space, Revisited. What is liminal space? The Latin root, “limen,” is a noun that means threshold, border, or beginning. “Liminal,” the adjective form, has been defined as:

1. Relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process
2. Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold

The original term, coined in cultural anthropology circles, describes the time in a cultural or tribal ritual where an actual transformation is occurring (e.g. from child to adult). It has also been used in traditional storytelling and mythology to depict a particular phase in a hero or heroine’s journey. More recently, the concept has been adopted and broadened by Jungian psychologists, spiritualists, and others to represent potent spaces of transformation when an individual, group or culture is no longer in a previous state but is not yet in the new state; when old ways of being no longer work but the new ways have not yet emerged.

I introduced the concept of liminal space in a prior post.  I invite you to visit that post for a more thorough discussion of the roots of the term and general recommendations for leading in liminal space. This post focuses more on the very significant (and uncomfortable) experience of prolonged stress that is one of the defining characteristics of a liminal period.  Three coping strategies – common behavioral patterns with which we try to manage that stress – are outlined, along with a set of self- and leadership reflections.

All of this is offered from a belief that, while the pandemic form in which this liminal space has come is deeply unwelcome, it (“life itself,” as the opening quote suggests) serves up a rich, and in some measure, a redemptive, opportunity to grow.

Our Stressed Selves. Several years ago, the American Psychological Association reported the average stress level of a representative American sample as 5.1 on a 10-point scale.   The top five rated stressors (and the percent who rated each stressor as either “very” or “somewhat significant”) are:

• Money (67%)
• Work (65%)
• Family Responsibilities (54%)
• Personal Health (51%)
• Health Problems Affecting the Family and the Economy (tied at 50%)

Would a re-survey now find a significant increase in the average stress level, along with some of the stressors having flipped position on the list? I would guess the answer is “yes.” 

But don’t take my answer for it. Try a quick self-assessment:  on a scale of 1 (“little or no stress”) to 10 (“ a great deal of stress”), how would you rate your current level of stress in each of the six areas covered by the APA’s Stress in America survey?

____ Money

____ Work

____ Family Responsibilities

____ Personal Health

____ Health Problems Affecting My Family

____ The Economy

Now, how would your ratings have looked six, or even three, months ago?

Most of us are walking around these days in the midst of an elevated stress experience, largely created by having a collective experience of feeling tremendous uncertainty around important factors related to our perceived personal safety and well-being. This collective experience is eminently reasonable and understandable. So, what can we do, if anything, to get through this liminal experience with a little bit more ease? Or even, possibly, to emerge out the other side of it as a stronger version of the selves that entered into it?

This post will suggest one approach. Future posts will provide additional approaches.

Three Coping Strategies. The more forward-looking leadership teams and leaders I am in touch with have spent time discussing “stress behaviors” they are seeing among their team members and ways to understand those behaviors. They are also eager to understand and receive some support for their own tendencies under stress. The story I opened with is representative of leaders’ attempts to note and make sense of the individual differences that are showing up under prolonged stressful conditions.

We can view stress behaviors as clues, or outward manifestations, of our own and others’ underlying coping strategies. How do we best make sense of those clues? By looking for patterns among them.

Many stress behaviors fall into one of three types of energetic patterns, according to an influential body of thought pioneered by the humanistic psychoanalyst, Karen Horney, M.D. In brief, our attempts to cope with stress and, in longer-lasting states, anxiety, tend to fall along three dimensions:  we either move against people (in aggression or power-seeking behavior), we move away from people (in withdrawal or avoidance behavior), or we move toward people (in compliance or approval-seeking behavior).

Each of these energetic patterns can be viewed as having associated biologically-wired circuitry: fight (against) versus flight (away) versus tend-and-befriend (toward) instincts that have long served a purpose in the human animal. Thus, each pattern retains, at its core, a healthy, life-enhancing property: moving against is about assertiveness, moving away is about taking some distance to gain perspective, and moving toward is about cooperation.

We can, and probably do, use all three orientations across time and different situations. But many of us are likely to have an underlying predisposition toward one pattern, what Horney calls “those ways and means of coping with others in which the particular person feels most at home,” based on childhood/developmental experiences. We also tend to overuse, or return to this “home,” during times of stress.

What might each of these strategies look like in action, in work relationships and situations, during a stressful time? I’ve supplied some thumbnail descriptions below:

It is important to note that these descriptions are extremely high level. How you might exhibit “moving away” behavior, for example, could look very different from someone else you work with: you might become very intellectualized to mask how you actually feel about a “charged” work issue whereas a peer starts skipping videoconferences related to that issue.  What will be most similar is the psychological purpose it serves within both of you: to help you manage stress and/or to help you feel safer by creating either actual or psychological distance from the work issue.

How to Use This? So, how might you translate this model from concept to action?How might the framework help you as a leader and as a person encountering heightened stress? First, knowledge can be powerful. This triarchic model has legs. Many clients I’ve introduced to it have found it to be a useful lens through which to be curious about what they see in any number of situations:  from understanding their own or another person’s behavior over time, to forming a hypothesis about patterns in a team (e.g. what do you get when you lead a team in which half the members tend toward “move against” and the other half tend toward “move away” attitudes?)  Additionally, several personality and leadership assessments integrate Karen Horney’s three dimensions into their theoretical framework:  the Hogan Development Survey, the Leadership Circle Profile, and the Enneagram, to name a few. But you need not wait to get formal diagnostic data back. Generally, I find you can follow the behavioral clues to form a hypothesis and then test that hypothesis by seeing how useful it is as an explanatory vehicle for future behaviors.  Or, most powerfully, if you take action to proactively address the “solve for” part of the tendency in a healthier manner.

Second, if you are looking to use this system to increase self-awareness, it can be helpful to seek feedback from others with whom you are interacting during this stressful time. As James Hollis, Ph.D., a prolific author, and Jungian analyst, stated: “Self-awareness has nothing to do with intelligence or intention. It is hard to step outside your stuff and reflect upon it.” 

You might simply ask: “What are you noticing in the way I have been behaving over the last several weeks?”  Or, a little more leading question if you don’t net much from that first one: “Do you find me behaving in ways that are seeming to bring me closer to or farther away from you (or others)? How effective am I being in responding to various situations that arise?”

Third, you can work (or coach someone else) through the following set of self-reflections as a means of restoring your center of gravity, such that you are better able to pull from the strengths offered by your predisposed strategy while introducing more balance:

• How might I take a more assertive, direct approach to this situation? What would that look like?
• How might I take a more measured, objective approach to this situation? What would that look like?
• How might I take a more collaborative, conscientious approach to this situation? What would that look like?

Last, know that the following premise underlies this model:  once we move beyond these coping strategies, we touch our uniquely human inheritance as wholehearted beings.  I’ll close with another powerful quote from Karen Horney, from her perch as a mid-twentieth-century Neo-Freudian and early holistic practitioner: “The comprehensive formulation of [developmental] goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one’s feelings, one’s work, one’s beliefs.”

How much more wonderful might this period on earth be made if we were all creating more from wholeheartedness instead of from fear?

The post In-between Times: Three Coping Strategies appeared first on Liminal Solutions.

“Growth doesn’t just happen to us.  Some sixty-year-olds have had sixty years of experience; others have had one year of experience sixty times.  We have to take advantage of the opportunity that is there.  If we lose it, we lose all consequences it would have given birth to, but if we grasp it, we gain all the consequences following from it.”

The Scene.  Just this morning, one of my clients noted the need to step away from the “fog of my day-to-day.”  This particular leader will be travelling with his immediate family and several other families to South Africa for a safari.  Having done so before, he described for me the magnitude of the re-set that he knows to expect while there.

“It’s as close to a spiritual experience as I get.  You cannot be unaffected by it.  There is no internet, no TV, no newspapers, no traffic, no light at night except millions of stars blanketing the sky overhead.  All distraction that gets us wrapped around the axle, that can cause us to be miserable human beings in some cases, drops away.  You feel really small amidst a profound appreciation for the planet and for civilization, and yet acutely aware of yourself, at the same time.  I know, while there, I’ll think over the last year – the personal challenges, our work together, my team here. I’ll think about the good and the bad.  And then look forward. With clarity.” (Note: this story is told with his permission.)

I’m already looking forward to hearing where his reflections take him, when he returns.

For the Rest of Us.  Opportunities for deeper reflection typically require us to get out of our daily “fog.” When was the last time you feel you encountered a totally brand-new life lesson or personal insight? In my own twenty-plus years as a psychologist and leadership coach, my experience is that most of us bump along accumulating small- and medium-sized events that impact us for a little while before we return to a sort of homeostasis, interspersed with a few truly momentous “take stock moments.” Those moments of piercing the veil around our existing ways of being (which may be mere moments, or may last for hours, or even days) may enter in the form of an unexpected shift in one’s life path (such as a health scare, a loss of a job or a relationship) or as a planned change like bringing a first child home from the hospital.

In whatever form they may come, these “take stock” interludes allow us to break through to the possibility of seeing a fundamental dilemma or truth about ourselves and our lives – if we’re paying attention.

We can wait for life to present us with those times of liminality, of seismic and perhaps painful shifts.  They will come.  Or we can pursue at least a simulacrum of one through committed inquiry.

A Committed Inquiry.  The last several years, I have published a year-end reflection along with a tool to assist with that inquiry.  This year, I am offering a guided reflection that includes a mindfulness activity to help you get into the right mind and heart space for the work, followed by a several-question inquiry that was inspired by the Stephen Miller quote at the beginning of this blog.  The exercise culminates in an assessment of whether you are circling a familiar issue or lesson that you’ve set intentions around in the past, then stopped short of creating the desired change (perhaps more than once).  If that pattern is true of you, I’ve also suggested a way to break through it, based on Kegan and Lahey’s concept of competing commitments.

The exercise unfolds like this (note: a downloadable version you can use to record your responses can be found here on the Liminal Solutions Resources page, under Tools > Year End Review):

Preparation

• Find a quiet space within your day, within your week, to sit with the following questions. 
• Prepare yourself for the inquiry by settling into your seat comfortably and tuning into your breathing.  Breathe a little more deeply, a little longer, than you might normally. 
• Shift your focus to your heart center, as if you were able to draw your breath into your heart center, drop it down into your belly and then release it back out through your heart center.  Do this for 10 breaths or so. 
• Next, still breathing slowly and deeply, invite a feeling of ease into your heart center with your breath.  Allow it to settle into your body with your breath.  And then slowly breathe that easeful feeling back out. 
• Repeat this process several times.

Reflections

• Read the opening quote again (or for the first time).  What does it evoke for you (thoughts, feelings, associations, etc.)?
• As you reflect over the most recent, meaningful period of your adult life (which may be one year, ten years, or more), where do you sense you fall against that depiction of learning one lesson repeatedly, or different lessons over time?
• Now, thinking just about this year that is coming to a close, what events or experiences stand out the most strongly to you as either meaningful and/or deserving of further reflection?

Pause here to repeat the heart-centered breathing sequence from the introduction:

• Looking back at the events and experiences you captured in the last reflection space, what does your deepest sense of self, of inner wisdom, have to tell you about the meaning or learning that is available to you through those experiences from the past year?  If it helps, return to your heart-centered breathing for a few rounds and ask yourself questions as you breathe in, and then quietly sit & notice what emerges in your heart space. For example:
  • “What am I supposed to learn through having struggled with several client accounts this past year?”
  • “What deeper purpose in my life path did changing bosses serve for me?”
  • “What meaning can I derive from the experience of having that huge health scare?”
• What do you glean about how those insights or learning might serve you in the coming year?  As you sit quietly and consider the new year as a blank canvas, what future images do these insights project?

Breaking through Resistance

• Now, here’s the kicker:  how “new” are the insights and/or actions you have listed in the last answer?  Have you run into these issues or made these commitments before (per the beginning quote and questions)?  If so, what has gotten in the way of you acting on these insights or actions in the past – i.e. what have you done instead and WHY (Kegan and Lahey, in their book Immunity to Change, call these “competing commitments”, our often unconscious fears or assumptions that block us from making change)? For example:
  • I have set a new year’s intention for several years now to stop drinking caffeinated drinks past mid-day, so as to improve my sleep at night.  But I haven’t been consistent in honoring that commitment.  As I sit and ask myself why, what I may be committed to instead, I come up with: “I don’t fully believe that caffeine at night is causing my sleep problems.” And “I enjoy my caffeinated drink of choice.  I don’t think I would enjoy anything else as much and I’m not willing to give up that source of pleasure.”  So, my competing commitment to my nice-sounding action plan to quit drinking caffeine past mid-day: I am committed to my proven pleasure of having my drink of choice over my unproven, potential sleep gains.
• If you sense you’ve bumped into a familiar issue with a competing commitment attached, what experiments or revised action steps could you put in place for 2020 to test your competing commitments? Continuing with my example:
  • Instead of committing AGAIN to stop drinking caffeinated drinks after mid-day, my new commitment is to conduct an experiment for one month.  I will drink organic tea at night for one month and track my sleep to see if it improves.  If it doesn’t, I will feel free to go back to drinking caffeinated drinks past mid-day.  Just typing that, it feels much more manageable to me.

Signing Off for the Year.  You may find one sitting with this inquiry will produce a noteworthy breakthrough or two, or it may take a couple of sessions.  Additionally, doing it alone might be the best way to work through it, or, alternatively, you may share it with some close others, serving as each other’s listener and feedback provider.  One former client mentioned to me that he tends to take these year-end reflections on his annual family car trip home, across several midwestern states.  The miles flash by as he, his wife and their adult children read the questions aloud, reflect from their respective spots in the car, and give voice to what comes.  What a wonderful ritual!

Whatever you do, do it with reverence for the often serpentine-like progress our paths to wisdom take throughout our lives.  The kind of insight we’re after here rarely arrives as if it were a product of a mathematic equation.  Rather, it’s more akin to stalking a wild animal on a safari of our own making…

Wishing you a 2020 of novel lessons! 

The post The Year in Review: Lifting the Fog appeared first on Liminal Solutions.

The Graduation. My daughter’s graduation was a joyous event.  Our family gathered in Madison, WI to celebrate the successful end of her four years as an undergraduate.  JJ Watt delivered a simple yet touching commencement speech recounting his time on campus and the years since, exhorting the new graduates to “Find a way to make a difference!” as he has done through his leadership both on and off the football field.   He asserted that while the young adults in front of him may not yet fully know how they were going to do that – as he hadn’t while he was a proud Badger, either – hard work and giving to others should lead the way. My daughter and her friends were effervescent in their giddy sense of accomplishment, one foot firmly planted in adulthood and the other foot eagerly rising to join it. The Visit. Earlier that same week, I’d traveled to my childhood hometown of Cincinnati to see family and to spend time with a childhood friend who has stage three breast cancer.  She’s one of the lucky ones, if there is such a thing with cancer.  Her prognosis is hopeful, with the recovery and survival statistics soundly in her favor.  Yet the chemotherapy treatments, the best means of ridding her body of the rogue cells, are wreaking short-term havoc on her health (which is already compromised by having lived with Type I Diabetes for 37 years). This visit marked the first time I’d seen her since her diagnosis.  We held each other long and hard after she opened the front door of her house.  She whispered into my ear, “I don’t want to have cancer anymore.  I’m so tired.”  We wept together. Two days later, we ventured out for blueberry pancakes…and her chemotherapy session.  While there, she spent much of the time lying with eyes closed, concentrating on the work her body was doing to heal itself.  She had asked me not to expect to talk with her during this process.  So, instead, I gazed at her periodically, memories of our many moments together flitting through my mind.  And I prayed for her.

The Juxtaposition. A college graduation and a visit with a sick friend.  Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois and Ohio. A busy week that involved hours driving from one section of the Midwest to another. A heart-filling sequence of events, most definitely.  But it turned out to be more than that. Hang on for the connection. And for an offering of my internal musings for those of you who care to listen and reflect alongside me.

Running…to what? A few days after returning from both those events, on mile two of a run, I pulled up short to better listen to a passage in a podcast.  Eckhart Tolle was describing a chapter from his best-selling book, A New Earth, and a particular lesson about conscious being.  He raised many interrelated points which go well beyond the space I’ll use here.  The most important points, filtered through how I heard them, were these:  1)  Many of us approach life by focusing on ego-related pursuits and ways of defining our sense of self (see this link for another blog about defining self); 2) this orientation tends to result in a lot of doing so that we mostly experience ourselves as “human doings” versus “human beings;” and 3) the opportunity – he and other thought leaders in this space might even say the greatest calling –  is to see through this DOING experience of the world and ourselves and instead drop into the more fundamental experience of our selves as BEING. What does that mean? It means being in the world, being present, in each moment, as purely and consciously as possible.  Of course, yes, we have lives to lead and they require taking action in the world. But how much do we define ourselves by our actions?  And judge others by theirs? And here’s the podcast excerpt that caused me to stop mid-way through that run.  Eckhart was describing a thought from another book, Stillness Speaks.   Here it is, recounted from my experience of it: envision the gravestones in any cemetery. Think of your future gravestone. Each has a birth year and a death year with a one- or two-inch dash in between those two dates.  That dash represents all the activity, all the hopes, fears and anguish, that occurred in between those two dates.  That’s it – a dash that takes up about one to two inches of space. And yet that’s what many of us pour our precious energies into, day in and out.  Filling out that little dash with DOING. Here is the actual excerpt from the book: “What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention?  A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone. To the egoic self, this is a depressing thought.  To you, it is liberating.” The distinction Tolle is making in that last line is between what some call our egoic self, or false self, and our real self.  Our egoic selves revel in puffing up the personal resume that stands behind that dash; our real selves know that authentic joy and our deepest sense of comfort come from releasing the need to prove anything.

Time as both vertical and horizontal.   Try this: take a blank sheet of paper.  Draw a horizontal line mostly across the width of that paper.  Then draw a vertical line in the middle of that horizontal line, so that it bisects the horizontal line. Perfect. This is a model that can be used to gain a quick but profound perspective on orientation to time, or the being and doing distinction. The horizontal line depicts the passage of chronological time – all the days and months and years that make up your life.  The vertical line, in contrast, represents full awareness, full BEING, in any moment in time along that horizontal dimension of life.  It’s the depth that is available, the tuning into the fullest experience of being present at any one point in time.  It can therefore be a shorter line or a longer vertical line, depending on how tuned in we are to just being present in a moment.

Finding Our Way. The connection struck me as I stood stock still. My friend has found this practice for her chemotherapy sessions, without even knowing that’s what it’s called.  She has found a way to stop time and just BE with the experience she is going through, tuning into all that it holds.  Her organic, bodily sense of how to best care for herself through the experience of chemotherapy has led her there naturally, amidst the noise of the infusion pump and thin curtained-alcoves containing other nearby cancer patients and their loved ones. And my daughter and her friends, suspended in time through the events of that graduation weekend, on the precipice of beginning their “grown up jobs” or heading off to gap year adventures seemed wholly immersed in the moment as well, even while being gently guided by their commencement speaker to think ahead along their own horizontal lines. There I stood, mid-run, also suspended in time, as I made the connection between these recent big life events. The juxtaposition was now feeling more meaningful than random. New awareness washed over me. Then I re-started my run. Ha! The push to finish that aspect of my horizontal journey taunted me.  This time, though, I practiced holding onto each present moment of the remaining miles as they flew by: the feel of my footfalls on the pavement, the sensation of my breath as it moved in and out of my chest, the sunlight as it warmed my head. Is that what an awakened life is:  holding both the horizontal and vertical, consciously?  Hanging out in the intersection.

Practices to Strengthen the Vertical.  How can we strengthen our ability to hang out in the vertical dimension, in BEING, more often?  I’ve covered several methods in other blogs, so I’ll provide a brief overview of three methods here (listed from least time consuming to most):

1. Seek Novelty: Ellen Langer, who some call “the mother of mindfulness,” promotes an eminently practical approach to mindfulness.  To combat our tendencies to engage in automatic, mindless, patterned behaviors for much of our day, she urges us to simply find novel ways to engage in everyday situations.  So, as you are engaged in a routine activity, or any time you need to increase your ability to pay attention to the present moment, adopt a practice of looking around the situation and noticing 5 new things (e.g. the color of someone’s sweater, the way the carpeting meets the walls in the corner of the room, etc.).  Or vary your routine – walk a different path to the meeting room in which you have your leadership drumbeat meeting every Monday.  Pay attention as you do so.  It doesn’t work to introduce novelty to your routine if you aren’t dialed in as you do it.
2. Tune into Your Heart Center: the HeartMath Institute provides a portfolio of powerful methods for accessing deeper states of awareness that do not require more than a couple of minutes of practice each time you use them. If you are new to their methods, try the Quick Coherence® and Inner Ease®

For your convenience, here is an overview of the quick coherence technique:

Step 1:  Focus your attention in the area of the heart.  Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual.  You could try to inhale for 5 seconds, then exhale for 5 seconds (or whatever rhythm is comfortable for you).

Step 2: Make a sincere attempt to experience a regenerative feeling such as appreciation, gratitude or care for someone or something in your life. Continue your heart-focused breathing as you do so.

2.  
3. Build a Meditation Practice: I know many folks who have struggled to build a regular meditation practice…and more who have benefitted greatly from sticking with the attempt to do so.  Even 5 – 10 minutes a day of centered breathing and non-judgmental observation of your thoughts and feelings can make a difference.  There are a number of wonderful apps you can download on your phone at this point.  A personal favorite is Headspace (I’ll confess to having a slight crush on the voice of the founder, Andy Puddicombe, who narrates all the Headspace meditations).

Turning a Minus into a Plus.   Taking a step back and re-reading what I’ve written here, it strikes me that someone could get lost in confusion about my usage of the two geometrical metaphors: the dash and the vertical/horizontal axes. I’ll try to reconcile them, provide an application, and then pose a final reflection. Here it is: do we want to live as horizontal line people (or “dash people,” since a dash is an abbreviated horizontal line, after all) – chasing achievements, more stuff, and better stories to tell about ourselves that satisfy our egos? Or do we want to live more as vertical line people – more fully present with our real selves, with others, and with our experience? I’m suspicious of binary choices, so I’m thinking the way to go is a “both/and”.  Doubtless, we each naturally spend time in the vertical dimension during one-of-a-kind life events where time feels suspended, as it was for my daughter and for my friend in those recent scenes.  And, frankly, it’s rather illogical to suggest we stop living in chronological time.  The opportunity before us, then, is to live and lead (ourselves and others) with more awareness of the vertical, of BEING, as well as to cultivate practices to spend even more time hanging out in that intersection. Approaching life as a plus sign – horizontal and vertical in balance – now there’s a thought. And perhaps if we do enough intentional living of life as a plus sign (which for most of us would mean spending more time cultivating the vertical aspect of our life lines), we can actually make our horizontal line thicker.  In other words, our actions would become more conscious, purposeful, aligned with our real selves, and therefore, more meaningfully impactful in the world.

Application.  I recently worked with a coaching client with whom this balanced, “doing AND being” approach led to a deeply insightful conversation.  Reflecting on several career path choices she has in front of her, she expressed a sense of being overwhelmed and uncertain about how to go about making the decision.  “I feel frozen in place – I’m not sure whether to stay in this job several more years, accept an offer to join the start-up company that’s been courting me, or leave the corporate world entirely to finally begin the think tank work I’ve long envisioned for myself.”  It seemed clear that she’d spent time analyzing the decision thoroughly from an intellectual standpoint, without achieving enough clarity to move forward. Sensing it might be helpful to drop her into a different mode of exploration, I guided her through a drawing of the horizontal & vertical line illustration, explaining the distinction between the two orientations to time.  Then we engaged in some heart-focused breathing together.  As we sat in the stillness afterward, I invited her to talk about the elements of each option again.  This time, however, we tuned into her organic sense of being energized or drained as she did so.  We found ourselves mapping the variations of energy in her voice, stomach and chest – the highs and lows – associated with various factors that distinguished the options, such as “provides flexibility for the mom part of my life,” “helps me build a network that could also support the philanthropic organization I dream of starting someday,” and “represents work that feeds my deeper sense of purpose.” She left our session palpably lighter in spirit, with a commitment to repeat this type of inner attunement process to continue advancing her decision making.  While her final decision is yet to be made, the exercise helped her to break through her sense of being stuck and increased her confidence that a deeper wisdom is available to guide her if she taps into it. For me, the experience was a wonderful reinforcement of the value of dropping into the inner guidance available in deep presencing or the BEING dimension – and then using what we learn to inform our actions or DOING.  Living the plus sign.

Final Musing. Because I am a visual thinker, Eckhart Tolle’s powerful words about that dash frequently call a personal scene to my mind these days, both while running and not.  When my gravestone is etched someday, I’ve decided I’ll take my stand (metaphorically speaking) as a plus sign person. I now plan to ditch the dash and instead, have my gravestone inscribed as follows: How about you?

The post What Are You Doing with Your Dash? appeared first on Liminal Solutions.

The Scene:

For him, that desert was a physical analog to the liminal space that had arisen in his heart and mind.

Lately, I feel that I am witnessing, and participating in, many people’s journeys into a metaphorical desert.

I see leadership teams contending with fundamental transformations of the way they lead and do business.  I sit with coaching clients who grapple with fulfilling the needs of those they lead in ways that call into question their core ways of being in the world.  I drink coffee with friends who have left a familiar phase of life and are searching, with a mixture of pain and hope, for the new path forward.  I read newspaper headlines that seem to describe a country and a global community in which long-standing structures, systems, and even values we took for granted as “givens” are crumbling at breathtaking speed.

Liminality abounds.

Betwixt and Between: Liminality has long been a favorite concept of mine.  I named my consulting business in honor of it.  But I often find myself defining it for others as they try to make sense of the company name on my business card.

What is liminality? The Latin root, “limen,” is a noun that means threshold, border, or beginning.  “Liminal,” the adjective form, has been defined as:

1. Relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process
2. Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold

The original term, coined in cultural anthropology circles, describes the time in a cultural or tribal ritual where an actual transformation was occurring (e.g. from child to adult).  It has also been used in traditional storytelling and mythology to depict a particular phase in a hero or heroine’s journey. More recently, the concept has been adopted and broadened by depth psychologists, spiritualists, and others to represent potent spaces of transformation when an individual, group, or culture is no longer in a previous state but is not yet in the new state, when old ways of being no longer work but the new ways have not yet emerged.

I first encountered the term when working with a Jungian psychologist who consistently encouraged me to recognize the liminal space I was in at the time, to make the most of its gifts, in a belief that each of us is given a precious few truly liminal experiences in a lifetime.  I continue to draw inspiration from her wise counsel in my own work.

Liminality isn’t just Change: I’ve been doing change management consulting for most of my career.  Yet working with people and human systems in liminal space is different.  There are commonalities, of course.  Something that used to work, whether it be a leadership behavior or a business strategy, doesn’t work anymore; thus, change needs to occur.

Yet in a liminal time, the nature of the change is far deeper and more difficult to define for a period of time than in the type of conditions we typically call “change.” Many of my clients are contending with a dizzying array of coinciding transformations in the form of radically new technologies, sweeping changes in market dynamics, and/or a need to completely re-think their organizational designs.  Old solutions not only no longer work, the underlying logic and analytical approaches that used to guide decision-making are being re-worked, too.  In short, there’s very little firm-feeling ground upon which to stand amidst the seas of change.

Enter liminality.

Liminality implies an inherently powerful and almost “pregnant” space.  It carries an intensity to it that signals an elemental shift is afoot – and that both destruction and construction are simultaneously occurring at a dizzying pace.  It’s a time of disorientation…and re-orientation. Of being unmade…and re-made.  Some refer to it as a time of “no longer and not yet.”  Still others refer to it as “crazy time.”

A crucial differentiator of liminality from a time of change is that liminality is about how we grow and are transformed by the time spent in liminal space.  It is not simply about tolerating or even surviving an uncertain time until the new state is defined. And the skills involved aren’t about managing it to get through it more quickly.  Rather, liminality speaks strongly of the interiority of the experience.  We must actively participate, even surrender, to the experiences of a liminal time and how we are to be shaped into our future professional and/or personal selves (or perhaps even more accurately, how layers of our false selves are stripped away to reveal what remains).

In religious writings, liminality is used to characterize God’s movement in our lives, a sacred passage between old and new.  Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and author, writes that liminality is “sacred space…all transformation takes place here…there alone is our old world left behind, while we are not yet sure of the new existence…get there often and stay as long as you can by whatever means possible.”

Leading through Liminality: The term has been gaining momentum in organizational effectiveness circles, too.  In a 2014 article in The Harvard Business Review on the leadership required during liminal times, Dan Pontefract comments that “Organizations must also periodically go through such wrenching times of transition, and it is during such liminal times that leaders have their greatest impact.” Further, he asserts that an organization going through a liminal time requires leadership who themselves experience liminality.

I couldn’t agree more.

The most credible leaders and people I want by my side through a liminal time are those who have opened to the forces of liminality in themselves, who have the stories of personal transformation to tell, and who have extracted wisdom by mining the richness of it.  In some ways, this type of leadership is resonant with Jim Collins’ Level Five Leaders, who have often been through personal crucible experiences of their own and allowed themselves to be irrevocably changed in ways that affect how they lead.

So, if you are entering, or are in the midst of, a liminal space, what are you to do?  How can you best lead yourself and others through it?

Opening to Liminality: The guidance available to us is almost maddeningly abstract – no change management recipes to be found here.  However, based on all I have read and experienced, I’ve outlined several suggestions below. A tool to help you through a self-guided reflection process can be found here.

• Set Your Intention:  I use a working definition of “leadership” that is “to bring the best forward in ourselves and others in the pursuit of meaningful goals.”  So, whether we are trying to lead ourselves through a liminal time in our personal lives or lead a team through a liminal time in our business lives, the goal is the same:  to bring the best forward in those who are involved and to do so in pursuit of a meaningful outcome.

The first suggestion is to get clear on your intention for this period of liminal time, however long it might last.  Who do you want to be as you carry yourself through it?  What qualities of presence (e.g. thoughtfulness, vulnerability, comfort with ambiguity) and/or character (e.g. candor, connection to others, integrity) do you commit to manifesting?  These qualities might be those you already possess or those you wish to cultivate in yourself during this time.

Either way, this intention should serve as a guidepost for you – sort of like that landmark that you guide your boat by as you bring it back into harbor.  Reflect often, perhaps with the help of journaling or a vision board, on how you wish to carry yourself through each day or a specific event.  And then re-center as needed.

• Monitor from Whence you are Acting: A point of vigilance regarding acting in alignment with your intention is to frequently assess whether you are acting from forces that lie “below the line” or “above the line”.

When you are below the line, you are acting from fear, defensiveness, or a sense of scarcity, resulting in a range of behaviors that either produce, or are a reaction against, a victim mindset.  When you are motivated by above-the-line factors, in contrast, you seek to create whatever measure of good you can by assuming responsibility for your behaviors and the consequences you get.

Another way of looking at this metaphor is that dipping below the line engenders ego-driven behavior while operating above the comes from your deeper self.

It can be appealing to hang out in a below-the-line position while going through a liminal time, given the untetheredness, sense of being out of control, and even fear that accompanies it.  And perhaps part of the resultant growth comes from hanging out there for a while until you are uncomfortable enough to try something different.  But liminality, by definition, connotes that significant shifts are afoot, so we have an opportunity to learn how to put our creative energies in service of those shifts and to co-create the path forward.

Importantly, this guideline does not suggest you should not feel fear.  Rather, you must be honest when you do and use that self-awareness to ensure that you don’t unwittingly create from that fear.  Instead, we can shift into great questions to assist us in getting above that line, like: “what is needing to die/be born here?” and “what do I sense about the momentum of these shifts and how can I get in better alignment with them?”

• Embrace Paradox and Uncertainty: Liminal times are, by their very nature, replete with paradox. You are neither here nor there; the truth of what has thrust you or your organization into a liminal time is neither black nor white.

The guidance here is paradoxical in itself: you must both let go and hold on at the same time.  As your sense of security and what you thought you knew to be true is tested, you can either resist by holding on to what needs to be shed even tighter or ease your grip.

Inevitably, your grip will have to ease – the liminal forces will make sure of it.  So, here, too, we have a choice to work in the direction the energy is flowing, to paddle our boats with the current, or against it.  Yet at the same time, we must remember that we do hold some power and authority over our lives and leadership –  we do have that paddle in our hands.  We are able to assert our creative energies where we can, so that, ultimately, we are both leading and being led.

The immense popularity of agile methodologies for product development and subsequent generalization to a broader organizational operating model represents exactly this kind of thinking.  Leaders are realizing the best solving is provisional at best. Instead of seeking certainty, we must get people moving through uncertainty, experimenting with smaller innovations, and challenge the mindset that innovation is an “all or nothing” proposition.

• Shift our Theory of Knowledge:  In liminal space, how we know what we know – our ways of making sense of the world – may feel as if they are under attack.  Yet one of the biggest gifts of a liminal time lies in its ability to fundamentally shift our personal epistemology.  Rational processes such as analyzing cause and effect will likely be outstripped by the magnitude, speed, and types of change occurring, causing us to reach for other ways to understand what is happening.  Sensing and intuiting, individually and collectively, will help us perceive new truths as well as the path forward

Otto Scharmer introduced his powerful “Theory U” as a change management model, yet I see it as most strongly addressing the dynamics of liminality.  His writings call upon us to lean into our deeper, intuitive sense of what new future is “presencing” itself in ways that challenge some of our deepest habits as critical thinkers and problems solvers:

“What I see rising is a new form of presence and power that starts to grow spontaneously from and through small groups and networks of people. It’s a different quality of connection, a different way of being present with one another and with what wants to emerge. When groups begin to operate from a real future possibility, they start to tap into a different social field from the one they normally experience. It manifests through a shift in the quality of thinking, conversing, and collective action. When that shift happens, people can connect with a deeper source of creativity and knowing and move beyond the patterns of the past. They step into their real power, the power of their authentic self.”[i]

Thus, we must be mindful of tapping into all channels of forming insight and knowledge:  head, heart, and gut. (For more information on parts of self and how to work with them, visit this link.)

• Balance the Aloneness with Being with Others:  As a leader, you must not allow the “turning within” that is inherent during liminal space to create distance or even detachment in yourself or among your team members.  Rather, you must find meaningful ways to forge connections such that you and others are co-creators of the new state, not simply “co-sufferers” or most damagingly, “co-reactors.”  Again, find ways to shift above that line and participate in acts of shared meaning-making.

I recently ran a session with an executive leadership team that is entering year two of a complete overhaul of their organization and ways of conducting business (Note: this example is used with permission of the leader).  They are an incredibly committed group of seasoned executives, yet many entered the team session deeply weary in spirit.  I asked them to sit in a circle and share journey maps of the months that had passed since the last time we were together.  As they took turns narrating the ups and downs of their personal and professional lives, the set of their shoulders eased, and their facial expressions softened.  I listened and was deeply moved, as personal support was both sought and offered. At the end, I shared an approximation of an old Meg Wheatley quote I carry around that goes something like this: “if you want to bring a human system back to life, connect it to itself.” Heads nodded in recognition as I did so.

Yet one of the first measures many organizations put in place during times of financial stress is to cut back on travel budgets, which in turn means many teams stop meeting in person.  Virtual ways of working together can and must have a place in our ways of connecting.  But there is no substitute for looking each other in the eyes, and having an experience of sharing our stories, during liminal times.

As we do so, we must be thoughtful together, to help mold and shape each other in ways that are both supportive and transformative of the leaders we are being and the leadership we are providing.  Questions such as, “What is emerging and what is our role in it? What is dying and what must be let go of?  In all of that, what are we being called upon to contribute and lead?” are crucial.

• Be kind to yourself.  Liminal forces can be very intense.  So, this last guideline is about self-care, both for your own benefit and the benefit of those you lead.

During liminal times, we must care for ourselves, to consciously nurture ourselves through rest, refueling, and fun.  One danger to avoid is to allow the “largeness” of what is occurring around us – and even within us — to eclipse our underlying humanity, to over-correct into solemnity and even severity of spirit.  We rightfully take refuge in the full expanse of our lives, seeking its grace.  Find times to play, to laugh, to rest.  If nothing else, we need strong, well-rested legs and full hearts for the journey ahead.

Additionally, engage in contemplative practices as a means of increasing your awareness of the narrative that is being built by and around you during this liminal time.  Pray, meditate, paint, take long walks with your dog – whatever helps you tune in and drop down into a greater degree of attentiveness to what is unfolding for and in you.

Do I Have to? Can you sleepwalk through a liminal time, avoiding the feelings of chaos and discomfort?  I suppose so.  I suspect many of us do as we buckle down and redouble the energy we put into the old ways of doing things. Or, rather than face the unknown, we stay in situations that no longer serve us.  But to do so would mean forgoing the experience of working alongside the almost magical forces that help to shape us, as individuals and leaders, into the more evolved versions of ourselves.

After time in the desert, our post-liminal selves meet the future with wisdom and a depth of consciousness that cannot be achieved otherwise.

The choice is yours.

[i] Excerpt from Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges, pg. 4.

The post Leading through Liminal Space appeared first on Liminal Solutions.

The time will come

~Derek Walcott

The Scene.  Sometimes, the perfect poem finds you.  Derek Walcott’s searingly beautiful poem “Love after Love” found me recently.  And inspired me to sit and write a first blog for 2018.

Last December, I published a year-end reflection that contained tools to use in thinking over the past year and forward into the new one.  This holiday season, as many of us headed out on the roads and into busy airports for reunions with loved ones who awaited us on the other end of our travels, I was struck by the image of homecoming, a coming home, to self – to that which is most fundamental, to that which requires no physical travel, yet possibly demands the most of us in the process of getting there.  And intrigued by the possibility of what we may find once we get there.

But that imagined journey begs a few fundamental questions: what is a self?  And how does one come home to it?

Coming Home to Self.  I am aware that I tread on sacred ground. Countless philosophers, psychologists, and mystics have delved into the questions posed above.  Few have arrived at a completely satisfactory set of answers.  Perhaps we aren’t meant to.  My interest here is in providing a glimpse into a few meaningful aspects of this topic, followed by a guided reflection to ease you into the new year.

To start, I’ll offer a working definition of self: one’s essential being; that which makes each of us unique from another.   Further, for a working model of that which comprises an individual’s self, I’d like to borrow from Carl Roger’s model of the three aspects of self:

• Self-Image: the view you have of yourself
• Ideal Self: who you aspire to be
• Self-Worth: the sense of self value or self-esteem you possess.

The amount of overlap between your self-image and ideal self usually determines the degree of inner congruence you experience:  the larger the shared space, the more congruence you feel.

And for most of us, the more congruence we feel, the greater our sense of self-worth.

The Inquiry.  So how do you come home to self?  Again, many thinkers I deeply respect have trod on this ground, so if you seek a deep experience of this sort, I’d recommend reading the work of Carl Jung, William James, or Ken Wilber (to name just a few). I offer the following process as a simple way to help you on that journey, should you be seeking a way to end or start your year with a useful exercise:

Self-Image. Operative Question: Who am I?

This question seems very basic.  Yet, its potency is unleashed with thoughtful usage.

A friend of mine sometimes uses the following exercise as an icebreaker with teams:

• Assemble 8-10 blank index cards (or follow thislink for a worksheet to use).
• Write down on each card a different answer to this question: “Who am I?”
• Then stack your cards by importance to your sense of who you are, with those cards that are most central to who you are at the bottom, those cards that are less central to who you are at the top.

What did you discover as you did this?  How did it feel to go through this exercise?

You may find that your answers can be arranged into the following categories: physical attributes, social roles, personality traits and existential statements.  As you do that additional categorizing, what do you notice?  Do you seem to define yourself more by your physical attributes, for instance?

Additionally, it can be a fascinating variant on this question to ask a close friend or family member to take a second stack of blank index cards and answer the question from their perspective on you.  And then compare your stacks in terms of both the descriptions and rankings.

Ideal Self.  Operative Question: What/who do I aspire to be?

To answer this question, you may simply take a blank sheet of paper and begin listing qualities you’d like to possess, to call your own.  Or alternatively, make a second pass at the card sort activity from the perspective of the future self you aspire to be:

• An opening visualization may help. To do that, sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes and focus on your breathing for a minute.  Concentrate on inhaling for a count of four, holding the breath for a count of seven, and exhaling for a count of 8.  Repeat this sequence at least 10 times.
• With your eyes still closed, visualize a meaningful time frame in the future (2, 5 or 10 years…or perhaps even toward the end of your life). Note: it may help to watch a mental image of a calendar slowly flip from one year to the next until you arrive at the future point you are interested in using.
• Next, picture your ideal self in the future frame, who you wish you will have become by then. Invite that self forward in your mind’s eye/imagination.  Notice how you look, the way in which you carry yourself.  Follow this future self as he/she goes about the activities and relationships that are most meaningful to him/her.  How would you describe him/her? Quietly sit and be an observer into this future version of yourself. 
• Now slowly return to a focus on your breathing. Notice the feeling of the ground under your feel and the seat against your body. When you are ready, open your eyes.
• Complete the same card writing activity you just conducted for your self-image but this time, describe your ideal future self. What qualities or descriptors would you use to characterize yourself at this future point? Write a different descriptor or element on each card and then rank them, most to least central to who you are in this future [for a tool to help with the self-image and ideal-self card sorts, go here]

What did you discover as you completed this second activity?  How did it feel to go through this exercise?  What is easy or difficult to picture aboutyour desired future self?

Self-Worth.  Operative Question: How do I feel about myself?

Now, compare the two stacks of cards (or descriptors if you didn’t do the card sort a second time).  What is the degree of congruence between the way you described who you are (your self-image) and who you aspire to be (your ideal self)?

Did you make any adjustments as you compared the contents of the exercises? For example, did you realize you’d been unfairly critical of yourself in the self-image activity?  Or perhaps you were surprised by one or more of the qualities that emerged to describe your future self?

Last, how do you feel about yourself after going through this activity?  How similar is that to how you tend to feel about yourself every day?

Sit. Feast on Your Life.  It may seem as if the goal of this inquiry is to strive for high congruence, a high degree of overlap between your self-image and ideal self.

It’s not.

It’s actually about the value of greeting our self, that beloved stranger.  Walking through the door of self-reflection and gazing intently in our inner mirror at who we are and who we aspire to be.  Nourishing ourselves on the experience – whatever the degree of congruence may be at any point in time.  And then, paradoxically, lovingly letting go of the results of that self-reflection.

Freeing our sense of self-worth from its dependencies.

As Walcott’s poem describes, the final work in coming home to self is to “peel your own image from the mirror.”  We separate our sense of self-worth from whatever we see in that mirror.

Whatever that image may be, good or bad, we let it go.  Then we sit.  We sit and feast on our life.

Happy New Year, everyone.  May you find a time and a space amidst the busyness of resuming your day-to-day lives to feast.

The post Feast on Your Life: A New Year’s Reflection appeared first on Liminal Solutions.

The Scene. 

Until I started golf lessons two months ago.

The Lessons.  Since then, I’ve not only fallen prey to the same obsession with improving my game that I’ve teased others about all these years, I’ve also noticed several principles at work that have applicability to another passion in my life – leadership.

Adopt a Growth Mindset. Carol Dweck’s research demonstrates that with few exceptions, most areas of our life can be enhanced by a “growth mindset.” Those with a growth mindset see talent and skill level as changeable through effort.  Even the most challenging performance situations present opportunities to learn and improve.  But oftentimes we act as our own worst enemy by internalizing a sub-par (pun intended) performance as a damning indication of a lack of ability – what she calls a “fixed mindset.”

I’ve struggled with a fixed mindset a shocking number of times in just two months of golfing.  Early on, I displayed what I interpreted to be a “natural ability” to putt well on the practice green and to hit the ball from the driving range.  A close friend egged me on further by labelling me “the best beginning golfer” he’d ever seen.

Enter my golf coach.  And digital analysis of my swing.  And several rounds of “real golf.”  As the negative feedback from my coach and my experiences on the course piled up, I fought my way through disappointment and a nagging sense of “maybe I just don’t have it.”

Some of you seasoned golfers in my reader audience may be laughing at the audacity of a wet-behind-the-ears golfer like me reaching such spurious conclusions of either having it/not having it.  But I did.  Until I spotted the fixed mindset behind both my positive and negative attributions. I used that insight to reframe my expectations from “I’m a natural/I’m not a natural” to “There’s a learning curve here – give it time.”

This principle calls to mind debates I have had while teaching leadership classes:  the classic “nature versus nurture” argument for leadership.  In short, is effective leadership a quality that acts more like a trait (e.g. some people are born leaders) or is it a set of skills that can be developed?

My own personal experience suggests the answer is “both.” And that situational demands need to be considered (e.g. the kind of leadership the business or organizational context requires).  But since we can’t do anything about our possession of a hypothetical leadership gene, we need to focus on the leadership skills we can cultivate – with the help of a growth mindset.

And I suspect the same principle is at work with golf.

Focus on a Few New Skills at a Time. I’ve had a lot of fun sharing my newly found love of golf with friends, family and even clients.  As we compare notes on our respective levels of proficiency and experience, typically the other person will begin to give me advice.  Well-intentioned tips on various swing mechanics seems to be a favorite area of commentary given I am such a novice.

I could be wrong about this, but based on the massive amounts of unsolicited advice I’ve received on my swing, there seem to be about 236 different elements to good swing mechanics.  And countless online videos back up that observation.  Just as there are countless leadership pundits, books, and online resources available to guide developing leaders on the “mechanics” of good leadership.

Yet as the swing advice continued to pour in, I felt overwhelmed.  I’d stand at the tee, club in hand, frozen as I tried to remember how far apart to place my feet and where to position the ball between them based on which club I had, how to move my knees and when, how in the world my hips were supposed to lead, and what kind of rotation to get in my shoulders – all as I struggled to keep my head down and my left arm straight on my backswing.  I’m exhausted just recounting it.

Now, all those elements are important to a good swing.  I’m confident of that.  But one day, I found myself repeating: “I’m just working on head, shoulders and arms right now” – a sort of mantra as I stood at the tee.  (It helped that my golf coach told me as long as my upper body was moving right, my lower body would follow – just like with a cadaver.  Very motivational metaphor!) As I did so, my head cleared and the tension eased. After that, I made a pact with myself to take my skill building a few elements at a time.  And once I’ve sufficiently mastered the first three mechanics I’ve picked out, I’ll move on to several more.

As a developing leader, it’s important to do the same – to select one, two or at most, three areas of focus for your change efforts.  Start with some fundamentals such as having a “why” to share for every significant piece of strategy or decision-making, ensuring you create openings for others in conversations as much (or more) than you talk, and/or mastering the art of telling a great story as a way to inspire.  And once you’ve accomplished those goals, take on some more.

This realization isn’t just based on my personal experiences as developing golfer and seasoned leadership coach.  Some great research has demonstrated that new skill acquisition works best by starting with one or two new skills at a time.  And stick with it until you reach the level of proficiency you want (estimates for new skill acquisition range from Josh Kaufman’s estimate of 20 hours to Malcolm Gladwell’s hotly debated “10,000 hours” principle to success in Outliers…I’m banking on Josh.)

Relax Your Grip. Among the best advice I’ve received is to relax my grip on the club.  As a beginner, I found myself gripping hard as I swung – so hard that the middle joint on my right-hand pinky finger became painfully swollen.  I mean, it’s called a “drive” for a reason, right?  You need to grip that club hard and swing it with force.

Not so fast.  One of my well-meaning, unpaid advisors (who doubles as my older brother) introduced the metaphor of holding the club with the same amount of pressure that you would hold a bird.  A whole new mental model emerged for me.  And my drives got better.

Similarly, I find that many developing leaders struggle with relaxing their grip.  Many of them have distinguished themselves as great executors of stuff, the individuals on a team who will always deliver.  As a leader, the objective is still to deliver but to do so through bringing the best in those you lead to the forefront – to relax your grip on the how while providing just enough of the what and why to hold them.

Make Peace with the Spotlight. This principle comes directly from my golf coach, Kim.  At our first group lesson, he put us to work on making a long putt one-by-one in front of the whole class.  Noticing the cringes on the assorted faces around the circle, he said “Listen, you’re going to have to get used to it.  You can’t play golf unless you can do it in front of other people.  That’s just the nature of the game.”

That’s not just true for golf pros who make their living by playing in front of crowds.  Amble over to your local golf course at most any time of the day to play a quick 9 holes and you will likely be matched up with a couple of strangers in an impromptu act of sports matchmaking…not to mention the folks who are waiting behind your group as you tee off because the course has gotten backed up.

Kim’s admonishment has a lot of relevance to the leadership arena as well.  As a leader, you have got to get comfortable “playing” in front of others.  Your leadership will naturally be a focus when you’re formally on stage giving a presentation or leading a team meeting. But what many developing leaders are unprepared for is the extent to which their daily leadership acts will be dissected and discussed by others. As I’ve said elsewhere, once you are a leader, your employees’ eyes will follow most every move you make.  So, you’ve got to find a way to get comfortable with it.

I’ve found that breathing deeply as I stand at the tee and reminding myself that everyone was a beginner at some point helps (there’s that growth mindset again).  But I’m still working on this one.

Even the Best Golfers Have Coaches. This last principle comes directly from a current client of mine (who gave me permission to recount it here).  As we discussed my learning process, which includes lessons with a golf pro, he said, “Listen, even the best golfers in the world have a golf coach.  They are never done working on their game.  They just keep finding ways to get better.” As I signaled my gratitude for that point, he went on, “Just like with your business as a leadership coach, even very experienced leaders still need a coach to keep them sharp, to point out the ways in which their ‘leadership game’ can get better.”  I paused in admiration for his deft skills with that analogy.

Then I recalled a memorable 2013 Stanford Graduate School of Business Survey of more than 200 CEOs, board directors, and senior executives which found that while “nearly 100% of CEOs said they would enjoy the process of receiving coaching and leadership advice…two-thirds of CEOS do not receive [it].”  So, while my experience suggests that many developing leaders at other levels have access to coaching, perhaps we have more room to grow in the C-suite?

Continuing with our comparison of golf principles to leadership, I wonder if we could hook more of them by introducing the construct of a “leadership handicap”?  Now there’s an intriguing thought…

The post Leadership Lessons from the Golf Course appeared first on Liminal Solutions.

I expected a productive day, certainly.  A client invited me to watch her and other leaders in her organization in action on the mainstage of large annual managerial gathering.  What I didn’t expect was to come away deeply affected by that observation experience.

I had a road to Damascus moment.

The Players.  Multiple acts of good leadership occurred during that forum.  I watched as my client and her direct reports took turns providing information on the future of the Fortune 25 company they serve.  They reinforced the corporate and functional goals with which the managers should align.  Most powerfully, the leaders engaged the minds and hearts in that room on questions around why they do the work they do and how to do it more intentionally.

But that isn’t the experience that is motivating me to put words on paper right now.  The transformative moments came in the form of two guest speakers who took the stage several hours apart from each other, unwittingly providing a one-two punch to knock out some of this blogger’s comfortable ways of being in this world.

Guest Speaker One.  Glen Hiemstra (www.futurist.com) was the warm up act.  He spoke of his work as a futurist who regularly peers 100-years in the future on behalf of client companies and those who follow his work.   This profession brings him into frequent contact with leaders of all types (e.g. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos), allowing him to catalogue the characteristics of those leaders who help their organizations, not to react to the future, but instead, to shape it.  Those characteristics include:

• Future-oriented
• Vision-driven
• Strategic
• Collaborative

In a compelling build, he engaged the room in a sequence of questioning and table exercises that brought his model to life – challenging the leaders to think beyond the short view in ways that were both vision-driven and strategic.  As he explained, “Most planning is a search for a more efficient past, rather than a search for a new future.”  Heads nodded along as he continued, “how many leadership teams do some sort of creativity exercise to begin a planning process, but then promptly forget that [as they engage in the actual work of the session]?”

He challenged the managers to define the long-range view such that it is a “magnet pulling us forward.”  Evocative stuff.

One of the most useful tips he gave was to work with the following types of vision:  the possible, the probable, and the preferred.  In his model, the last type fits the true meaning of the word “vision.”  Bill Gates’ vision of putting a computer on every desk, now ancient history in ways that have perhaps desensitized us to its ambitiousness, was cited.  As was Elon Musk’s more recent proclamation that he will create self-sustaining civilization on Mars as a step to an interplanetary civilization.

Last, Hiemstra emphasized that leaders who shape the future do not do so alone.   They ask the question: “how do we involve more people in the accomplishment of the buckets of activities we need to pursue in the next 1, 2 or 3 years?” In my experience, if leadership has done the hard work to define a vision that embodies that magnetic quality mentioned earlier (engaging both head and heart, per the elephant and the rider metaphor) AND that vision is accompanied by strategies that outline the path forward, the collaboration of others becomes much easier.

Cool stuff – not rocket science but a compelling set of concepts to answer a question those of us who work with many different leaders and organizations are frequently asked in one form or another: “how do we (as a company, an institution, a field, you name it) not just create change but transform the future?” Exit Guest Speaker One.  Hang on for what follows.

Guest Speaker Two.  I had noticed a second guest speaker listed on the agenda for the afternoon:  Paul Hawken, environmentalist.  That interest area aligns with the formal responsibilities of the leaders I was there to observe, so I wasn’t surprised.  I also wasn’t particularly intrigued.  I have watched and read the various news stories about Global Warming and, quite frankly, had grown rather pessimistic about the odds involved in turning the ominous predictions in a different direction.

Then Paul Hawken took the stage.  And at the risk of ruining a potential dramatic reveal as an ending for this blog, he pulled off a remarkable act of transformational leadership…in one hour.

Here’s my breakdown of what he accomplished, using Hiemstra’s characteristics of leaders who shape the future:

• Future-Oriented: Several years ago, Hawken and a collection of great minds took on an act of looking forward in service of humanity.  They gazed long and hard at the future of our planet, modeling various scenarios related to the causes and effects of global warming.  (You can find much more about their Project Drawdown here.  Also, for convenience, I will cite Paul Hawken as the source of this work through the remainder of this article but please know that the project he represents is the output of a prestigious collective.)

Now this act of gazing into the future, in and of itself, does not transform the future, as Hiemstra suggests.  Rather, Hawken and his colleagues engaged in methods of looking forward that challenged the premise that the future will be defined by the past AND even challenged the basis for, or the mindset behind, the way we’ve been asking the questions about the future.

In other words, he feels we’ve been asking the question wrong.

Most notably, we have conjectured about how to slow down global warming, as if its presence is a given.  Hawken took this way of looking into the future as deeply flawed – one that creates apathy and, worse, a sense of helplessness in the very people, all of us, who need to be engaged.  As he put it, “asking how to slow global warming is like driving a car more slowly toward a cliff.”

One of Hawken’s first acts of transformational leadership then was to re-define the question into the following:  how do we reverse global warming?

• Vision-driven: Reverse global warming?  REVERSE GLOBAL WARMING?  Now there’s a vision!

That vision engages, enlivens, and gives hope.  Who wouldn’t want to hold that picture as not only a possible future but as the preferred future?  As Hawken pointed out in the session, “naming a goal that is this inspiring opens up the best creative and innovative thinking,” which is what attracted the brilliant collaborators who volunteered their time over a two-plus year period.  And what also attracted the creative juices in that room yesterday, the folks who are tasked with shaping environmental strategy for a major corporation.

The magnetic energy of that single vision statement far outstripped the physical presence of Paul Hawken, standing on the stage.  It became a palpable force in the room.

• Strategic: The work done by Hawken and his collaborators will be published in book form on April 18.  He gave the audience a glimpse of the buckets of activities that would need to be pursued to reverse global warming.  There are 100 solutions – all of which already exist somewhere in the world.  Those solutions range from educational to energy-based to technological.  I don’t have permission to share any of them so I won’t.  My point is this:  not only did he show the way with a compelling vision, but he also provided a potential path forward that calls for expanding on good practices that already exist.

• Collaborative: As already stated, a vision, well-crafted and truly forward looking, has a magnetic quality of its own. When combined with strategies that make it seem achievable to those touched by it, collaborative magic is born.  As Hawken stated: “It’s not ‘what can I do?’  It’s ‘what can we do?’  The problem has been the pronoun.”

I overheard numerous conversations among experts in the environmental sciences after that session, discussing how they might contribute to the effort Hawken described – both through their professional roles in a major corporation, that itself could be a significant force for good, and through their personal practices.

I left asking myself the same question:  what can I do?  Different ideas are percolating, fueled by a sense of hope, even optimism, that I hadn’t felt prior to this session.  Perhaps one small act was accomplished by writing this blog and expanding it to my collective, the “we” I inhabit.

Closing Thoughts. We have yet to see what act of co-creation we, as a society, will produce as a result of the upcoming publication of Hawken’s book.  But one thing I do know:  yesterday, I witnessed an act of transformational leadership across two seemingly unconnected leaders.  One who threw the tennis ball up in the air by introducing a leadership model to use in shaping the future, and the other who served it right down the line by demonstrating how he is doing just that – engaging in a spectacular bid to shape our collective future.

The post Transformational Leadership: Creating “Road to Damascus” Moments appeared first on Liminal Solutions.

The Scene.

A few years ago, when conversation was flagging a bit, someone turned to me and said “hey, you’re a psychologist…what questions could we each answer about our lives over the past year to help us in the coming year?”  I thought for a moment and pulled a few out of my virtual hat.  A new level of depth, and hilarity, emerged.  That change in our process went over so well that it has become a part of the yearly gathering, so much so that I now prepare several questions ahead of time.

All of which made a recent client exchange even more meaningful to me. This client asked whether I had some year-end reflections to provide to her, to help her use planned downtime over the holidays for a clearing out of sorts (also called a “defrag” in my last blog).

“Gosh, I have done that periodically in the past,” I replied, “but I don’t have a standard set of ‘go-to questions.’ Would you like me to create something?”  “Yes!” came the enthusiastic reply.

I love when my professional and personal lives align – when a creative product can serve multiple purposes.

The Value of Looking back to Move Forward.  Much has been written about the importance of looking back as well as forward.  Grabbing one quick sample from this vast literature, James Kouzes and Barry Posner have done extensive research into the fundamental qualities that we associate with an effective leader. In their seminal book, The Leadership Challenge (a favorite textbook in many an “Introduction to Leadership” course at the university level), they share that over 70% of thousands of folks surveyed on said qualities rated “forward-looking” as a key leadership competency (second only to honesty as the most admired trait).  But, they argue, “in order to create the future, we must first look back.”  Indeed, Lawrence Lippitt, the thought leader behind the “Preferred Futuring” approach, posits that by first taking a clear look at how we’ve gotten to where we are, we are able to unleash the creative juices most needed for the process of visioning forward.

The process of looking back and forward is not limited to those who are formal leaders, however.  It’s also a way of life.  Five centuries ago, St. Ignatius introduced a 5-step daily reflection, The Examen, to the Jesuit order.  It remains a cornerstone exercise for many spiritual practitioners, Christians and non-Christians alike.  The sequential steps include a look back on one’s day (or a specific period of time), guided inquiry into significant moments and emotions, followed by a look forward to potential opportunities to apply the resultant insights.

So, that is where we shall begin this year-end reflection:  first by looking back.  Then we will look at the present and from there, gaze forward.

Quick confession: I debated about including the section on “the present” in the spirit of brevity.  But if you don’t know where you are, it’s hard to plan how to get where you want to go. Also, given the season we are in, it seems fitting that we travel the same paths that Scrooge did in A Christmas Carol – with visitations from the ghosts of past, present, and future.  Although an unwilling participant at first, Scrooge grew from that reflection process as well.

The Reflections.  The questions in each section are organized in a casual order from more general to more specific, also from more superficial to more interpretive.  You might want to read them through first to see how you’d like to move through the list, and even which ones you want to use/not use.  In other words, there’s no sacredness to what you’ll see below.  Make it your own.  But move through each section or type of inquiry in order (e.g. from past to present to future), culminating in “netting it out.”

I’d suggest you set aside some quiet time in a comfortable space, perhaps in one sitting or across several.  Or, like the Loftus women described above, you could wait until you are in a noisy restaurant and pass questions around the table along with the bread basket.

The Year in Review. 

1. What were the highlights of the past year? (This is a warm-up question – more of a recounting than a creative act.  Try to find 5 or more highlights but don’t work too hard if no more than a few are forthcoming.)
2. If you were to assign a newspaper-type headline to this past year, what would it be? Why?
3. What was most energizing and life-giving about the last year? What drained you?
4. What was most unexpected? What played out exactly as you hoped for and/or expected?
5. Of what are you most proud? What do you regret/wish you had a “do-over” to use?
6. What new habits, behaviors or mindsets did you establish that worked well? What old habits, behaviors or mindsets got in your way?
7. For what are you most grateful?
8. What did you learn: about yourself?  About close others? About the world?
9. How have you changed over the past year as compared to the previous year?

The Present. 

1. Where are you now? Where did the roads of the last year lead you?
2. If you were to assign a newspaper-type headline to your present life, what would it be? Why?
3. Evaluate your current sense of well-being in the following areas of your life on a scale from 1 (not at all where I want it to be) to 10 (exactly where I want it to be). Use any or all of the following life focus areas. (Note: if you prefer to graph it, the balance-wheel figure is available by following this link to my website.)

• Work/Leadership Impact
• Physical Health
• Spiritual/Religious
• Financial
• Romantic/Partner
• Family
• Friends/Social Life
• Community/Giving Back
• Growth/Development

Reflect on the ratings you have assigned to each area. How satisfied are you with each one and with the overall composite?  (It’s important to say here that while most of us would prefer to have a balance wheel of all 10’s, life often requires tradeoffs among areas that compete for our attention and energy.  So be thoughtful – and even a little kind to yourself – in this reflection.)

The Year to Come. 

1. What major events or significant life moments do you expect to occur in 2017? (This, too, is a warm-up question.  Simply list the most predictable significant events or life moments you see ahead for 2017 (e.g. “I will turn 50.”))
2. What major events or significant life moments do you hope for and/or aspire to occur in 2017? Which others might you want to avoid or try to prevent from happening?
3. If you were to assign a newspaper-type headline to the coming year, what would you like for it to be? Why?
4. In looking at the well-being assessment you did in the prior section, in which areas would you like to maintain the current sense of wellbeing that you have? In which area(s) would you most like to create changes and what kind of changes (e.g. “I’d like to move the 5 rating that I gave to physical to an 8”)?
5. What would you like to learn in the coming year? What would you like to see, discover or explore?
6. What new habits, behaviors or mindsets would you like to cultivate? What old habits, behaviors or mindsets would you like to release?
7. How would you like to grow, change and/or develop? What skills would you like to develop, improve or master?
8. How would you most like to remember this coming year when you look back on it in 5, 10 or 20 years?

Netting it Out. 

1. What are the implications of all of the above? What actions might you consider taking in 2017 to put your insights to use?
2. Where might you need to release some things you are holding onto and/or forgive (yourself or others)?
3. What one goal for 2017 would most inspire you and feel life-giving as you worked toward it?
4. What are 2-3 of the smallest changes you could make that would create the biggest shift toward what you desire?

A final note here:  while you may complete this reflection as a “one and done,” it might also be worthwhile to record these thoughts now and then review them again periodically throughout the year – monthly, quarterly, whatever – making updates as you go.

The Balance to be Struck.   For years, I had a framed poster of a favorite excerpt from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland hanging in my children’s playroom. The quote is taken from Chapter 6:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—“ said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

I’ve often used that passage in visioning sessions with groups, to help frame the importance of the work we are there to accomplish.   So, I now close this last blog of 2016 with an invitation and a commitment of my own:  let’s walk purposefully and with clear intention into the new year, guided by thoughtful insights from the past, shall we?  Given the significant global and national challenges we will confront in 2017, just getting SOMEWHERE will not be good enough.  I feel that to my core.

How about you?

The post Through the Looking Glass: Reflections for the New Year appeared first on Liminal Solutions.

The Scene. 

He looks over at me.  “What do you think I should I do?”

The Ubiquity.  I often bear witness to leadership clients struggling to make major decisions.  One privileged aspect of being a coach and consultant to others as they make decisions is that you often walk alongside them during their key inflection points.  My experience during this kind of moment is that many leaders fall into a double loop of confusion and self-flagellation when feeling unclear about how to make a key decision. The first loop of internal dialogue contains the confusion over how to make the right decision; the second loop holds the confusion (with a chaser of self-criticism) about why they are even in this quandary.

If that second loop had a voice, it would angrily mutter things like: “I got to this level because I have a track record of good decisions.  So why aren’t I better at this?!”

The Ego’s Lament.  These leaders aren’t alone in their frustration, despite their egos’ lament.  Decision-making dilemmas comprise one of the most frequent reasons people seek help, professionally and personally.  Multi-day workshops are dedicated to the topic of effective decision making.

We all admire a decisive leader.  In feedback interviews of various clients’ key stakeholders, they often raise decision making as a key element of leadership efficacy.  At the other end of the spectrum, indecisive leaders are castigated by their followers, the media and political pundits alike.   The Harvard Business Review declared that an indecisive boss is one of “three particularly ineffective kinds of leaders.”

Closer to home, decision-making angst is also a common lunch topic with friends.  Searching together for the “right” answer about love relationships, kids, family dynamics, work lives and even spiritual meaning is the glue through which many a friendship has been cemented.

Ultimately, our personal and professional lives are indelibly shaped by the decisions we make – as is organizational success.  Indeed, as the authors of the article “The Decision Driven Organization” assert, “A company’s value is no more (and no less) than the sum of the decisions it makes and executes. Its assets, capabilities, and structure are useless unless executives and managers throughout the organization make the essential decisions and get those decisions right more often than not.”

Consequently, the sense of frustration and stress that comes with being stuck in a decision-making dilemma, whether professional or personal, can be significant.  As one client recently said to me, her face a canvas of desperation, “I can’t seem to find my internal compass on this decision.  I feel completely lost.”

So how can we better navigate through times when the decision isn’t coming easily?

Decision Making Basics.  Myriad decision-making models exist out in the decision-making literature.  With some variation, most models depict the following steps to decision making:

• Define the problem
• Establish decision making criteria (e.g. what would good look like?)
• Weigh the decision making criteria (which are most/least important)
• Generate alternatives
• Evaluate alternatives against the criteria
• Choose the best alternative
• Implement the decision
• Evaluate the decision

In addition, important considerations around roles and decision-making authority exist, aided by well-known models like RAPID and RACI. These models, and others like them (every consultant has his/her favorite decision making model), can be helpful guides from a process standpoint. My observation after twenty-plus years of leadership consulting and a substantially greater number of years living my own life is that the more “struggle worthy” moments of individual decision making aren’t usually due to a lack of rational process, however.  Rather, we get stuck because we’re not engaged in an exclusively rational decision process.

Parts of Self.  If a decision has significance to us, we are rarely operating solely from our intellect or “rational selves.”  As far back as Plato, those who make it their business to explore why we do what we do have distinguished between various aspects of self that exert their influence in decision making situations.  Freud famously proposed that we have a superego, ego and id, each of which plays a unique role in determining behavior.  More recently, the field of leadership development has taken notice of research suggesting that our decision making emanates from the interplay among the components of a tri-partite system: simply put, our head brain, heart brain, and gut brain.  Each component relies upon a complex neural system that contains its own intelligence.  One author depicts the primary functions of each brain in the following way:

• Head Brain Functions: cognitive perception, thinking and meaning making
• Heart Brain Functions: emoting, values, and relational affect
• Gut Brain Functions: core identity (self/not self), self-preservation and mobilization

If this model feels brand new to you, consider how often you have said, “my gut instinct on this one is…” or “my heart just wasn’t in it…” in sorting through a matter of significance.   Viewed through this lens, all three types of intelligence affect our decision making.  Indeed, an emerging field of leadership development known as mBIT (multiple brain integration techniques) purports to assist leaders in building strategies to integrate all three systems to achieve superior decision making.

Enter the Elephant.  One of my favorite (and most practical) models in this space comes from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and expert in ethical leadership.  In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, he offers the evocative metaphor of the elephant and the rider to explain the dualistic forces that influence most decisions (quick sidenote:  Chip and Dan Heath built extensively on Haidt’s metaphor, with great success, in their book Switch).  In brief, Haidt proposes that we view our emotional selves as an elephant, upon which is perched a rider, our rational selves.  Both elements of self ideally work in concert with each other to create effective action.

The reality is often less than ideal, however.  Given deep-seated cultural values and social conditioning that favor rationality (not to mention years and years of formal schooling), most of us pour energy into our rider, using the “reins” of intellect and objective analysis to lead our elephant in the direction our rider has decided is correct.  If our emotional self, the elephant, is not in alignment with the rider, our rider attempts to overpower its brute force by ignoring it or offering rational explanations to appease it.

These tactics can work for a while but if we make a habit of suppressing misaligned emotional needs, the rider eventually grows weary from the effort expended to hold those needs at bay.  The elephant bucks the rider and havoc may be the result, leading to behaviors that may seem shockingly out of character.

Alternatively, if we tend to lead excessively from our emotional selves, letting the elephant guide us, we may find that our decisions and actions create unintended consequences or suffer from inconsistency, driven by the emotions of the moment.  One need look no further than the recent presidential race for examples of this kind of behavior.

Netting it Out.  So, what are we to do?  First, self-awareness is key…or should I say, “multiple-selves awareness is key”? In using this model, we must become comfortable with the concept of having multiple aspects of self with which to work. Indeed, in working with coaching clients, I liken this parts-of-self way of processing to their experiences with making decisions in a team setting.  Our parts of self (head/heart/gut or emotional self/rational self, you choose!) form a team of a different sort – all internal.  Thus, similar to working a decision within a team, it’s important to check in with each team member to gather input for optimal decision making. Particularly on the more important decisions.

How to execute that checking-in process? You might begin by assigning one chair in your office to each part of self and then move from chair to chair, giving voice to the viewpoint of that part of self on the matter at hand (helpful hint here:  unless you want a crowd to gather, shut the door first).  Or, if playacting isn’t your thing, draw several columns on a whiteboard or sheet of paper. Assign one column to each aspect of self as you write out the pros and cons of a decision.  Then sit back from the parts-of-self processing you’ve just done and see what you’ve got to work with.  At that point, you are back in what I (and some others in this space) call your “executive self.”  Your executive self is the leader of that internal team, the master processor who observes all the parts, without whom you couldn’t work through a process like this.

Involving Living, Breathing Others.  Which brings us to the next decision making tip –  the value of gathering input.  Your various parts-of-self aren’t the only “others” who can provide assistance to decision making; so, too, can the walking parts-of-selves containers that you call your friends, co-workers and employees.  Many decisions will be improved through the collection of input from, or even sharing the decision-making rights with, relevant others.  Particularly if those others either hold valuable information and/or have a stake in the outcome.

As one of those card-carrying, model-toting consultants I referred to earlier in this article, I call upon a favorite decision-making model around how to involve others that has proven useful to a number of coaching clients. It looks like this:

(Note: I believe this model was originally developed at Toyota as a part of its quality programs but I have been unable to find a clear trail of attribution. I learned it from some wonderful OD colleagues earlier in my career.)

Every position on this model is a viable approach to making a good decision.  The most straightforward approach is to make a decision entirely on your own (fondly referred to as a “D&A”).  On the high end, you can also give the entire decision away to others, as long as any pre-conditions (“constraints”) are made clear as you do so (e.g. “Team, I’m going to let you determine the sales targets for this product line.  The only constraint you have to work within is that the full set of targets must, at a minimum, result in an average growth of 5%.”).

The magic lies in choosing which decision-making approach to use and when.

The Magic.  In deciding which approach to choose (e.g. “should I just decide on the new organizational structure and announce it or should I work with the leadership team to build it?” or “should I just break up with this woman or should I talk about it with her?”), you might first consider:

• how valuable the information is that the others may hold;
• whether their support is important to the success of the decision and
• the tradeoff between involving others and the time required to reach the decision.

Additionally, I believe you also should reflect on your values as a leader, parent, partner and/or friend as another consideration in choosing the approach you want to adopt.  How do you want to be experienced by the others as you make decisions over time?  In other words, what would you say is the ideal distribution of all the decisions you have to make across those 5 points on the model? Would you like to be experienced by others as primarily a consensus-builder, with periodic forays into D&As?  Or would you prefer to operate as a person who keeps to his/her own counsel most of the time?

Once you’ve set that vision for yourself, it can be useful to periodically perform an audit of how much time you spend in each position on the model.  Are you engaging in too much D&A or giving too many decisions away?  Or are you living up to your vision?  Is your vision delivering the results that you want (or need) to deliver? You may need to make some adjustments.

The Next Right Move.  Sometimes, decision making your way out of a tough corner is not about painstakingly working through your parts-of-self considerations or putting effort into engaging others in your decision making.  Sometimes, the best decision-making process is to simply identify the next right move to make.

Have you ever been confronted with a life or leadership decision so big, so complex and/or in such an uncharted part of the terrain that you feel lost, despite your best and most valiant efforts to wrestle it to the ground?  Then rest your weary head (heart and gut) in the comfortable lap of Oprah Winfrey, whose advice to a Stanford Business School class had almost two million hits at my last check.  Her guidance for navigating through times of feeling lost is to get quiet, then ask (and answer) “what’s the next right move?”    After making that move, you just keep asking that same question and finding the next right move, repeatedly.

This approach is similar to a more rigorously researched method from the HeartMath Institute called the Freeze-Frame Technique.

Research into the use of Freeze-Frame and its effects on physiological markers of stress, self-reports of internal state, and a range of performance indicators demonstrates that:

As a result of using Freeze-Frame, perception can shift markedly: individuals find they can think more clearly and often transform an inefficient, emotionally draining response into a proactive, creative one.  With practice, this tool can be used effectively in less than one minute. (extracted from Science of the Heart, a free publication from the Institute of Heartmath)

The steps are as follows:

1. Take a time out from the stressful situation or thought (e.g. working hard at making the decision)
2. Engage in heart-focused breathing (shift your attention to your heart area and visualize drawing breath in through your heart and out through your solar plexus for some number of breaths)
3. Activate a positive heart feeling (e.g. think of someone or something you appreciate or love, reflect on something you are grateful for)
4. Ask yourself what an efficient, effective decision or action would be in the situation
5. Quietly sense any change in perception or ideas that come forward (the shift may be subtle, requiring you to be patient and stay tuned in)

The bottom line here: once again, sometimes a vexing problem is not solved by relying on what we would traditionally call a “rational” decision making process.

Take Time to Defrag.  I used to work with a very insightful coaching client who talked about periodically needing to defrag her life.  It might not surprise some of you to know that she is a senior IT leader (note: I have her permission to include her story in this blog).  Not being particularly conversant in IT lingo, I asked her for a working definition of “defragging.”  She described it as process of gathering up all the disparate fragments of information, data and experience that she collects during a busy time and making sense of them.  To do so, she schedules some open time in her calendar and uses it to step back from the action.  She reflects on significant issues and relevant information she has collected since the last defragging.  Then she sits and waits for new patterns or insights to emerge.

By the end of the defragging process, she has potentially reorganized how she is viewing or approaching an issue.  Her decision making improves, as does her sense of clarity and confidence.

As I wrote this blog, I quickly ran a definition search of “defrag” through google.  Turns out defragging is not just a process to reduce fragmentation of the way data is stored on a computer’s hard drive.  My favorite related definition came from the Urban Dictionary:  “Antonym of frag. le, to bring someone back to life.”  You see, it turns out fragging is also a slang term for shooting an enemy in a single person shooter computer game.  So defragging is a process of bringing back to life.

I love this additional level of meaning to my client’s metaphor.

How much might all of us be “brought back to life” in a difficult decision-making situation by stepping away from the hustle and bustle of a busy day, or our concentrated efforts to make a big decision, or all the conversations we might be having with other people about it, to breathe deeply, sit quietly, and wait for the patterns or insights to emerge?

Back to the Beginning.  Back to the scene that opened this article. What did that leader decide to do?

After we spent some time walking through the various trade-offs involved in whether to make a D&A, a consensus-based decision, or leverage the decision with constraints, we ended the session.  At our next session, I asked him what had happened.  He answered by sharing a version of the following:  “Well, I thought about making the decision myself and almost did that.  That would have been quick and easy.  But then I was out doing some yard work this weekend when suddenly I had this feeling that I should direct the team to work on it together and bring their decision to me.”

He went on: “I’ve been building this team for some time now and I felt there was value in telling them to lock themselves in a room and figure it out together.  I got some push back on it, particularly from the folks who are used to a more traditional hierarchy of decision making at the top, but my gut instinct told me to stay the course.  So they did it.  And came out a better team for it, I think.  They will really stand behind that number now.”

Excitedly, I described the head/heart/gut model to him, cueing on his reference to all three decision-making centers in the way he told his story.  I mentioned that, coincidentally, I was writing an article on the very same topic.  He sat musing for a minute or two.  “Does this mean I will be featured in your next article?”

Why yes.  Yes, it does.  And my elephant and rider are aligned on that decision.

The post When Deciding Gets Hard appeared first on Liminal Solutions.

The Scene.

What did I observe in that group of elders that would benefit the younger team?

The Bookends.  At first glance, the two experiences couldn’t appear more different. On one hand, we have five septua- and octogenarians away for a mini-break in a vacation home: playing cards, soaking in the pool, and taking trolley tours of the surrounding area – all against a backdrop of constant good-natured banter. On the other, eight leaders in their mid-career years ensconced in a resort meeting room: getting to know each other, wrestling with deeper questions of how to lead their newly-formed organization, and bonding around the headiness of being engaged in a start-up.  Little map-ability from one to the other, right?  Perhaps.

But my imagination conjures up a different answer.  What if the twain had met?

Elders versus Elderly.  I’ve had the pleasure of watching my mother and her friends on numerous occasions.  They are a tight-knit group of widows who care deeply for each other.  They sing together at nursing homes, go on several carefully planned trips a year funded by periodic monetary contributions to a “travel account,” and most importantly, support each other through the health challenges and personal losses that are inevitable at their age.  In short, they take care of each other.

Not all people in their age range are wise or qualify as “elders” but these women are.  Their system dynamics and conversations reflect a wisdom that I treasure.  (Even while I’m being teased as the token youngster, which is also something I treasure given my own advancing age!)  They are a team engaged in co-creating lives of continued meaning together.

Co-creation and Nourishment. The leadership team I had the pleasure of working with is also engaged in co-creating lives of meaning together, as leaders and as human beings.  Both aspects of the leader self were present, and acknowledged, as they discussed meaty topics…as it often true in the best leadership teams.

We examined the years leading up to this point in time and the various leadership journeys they’ve each been on; most notably, the aspects of those journeys they wanted to intentionally put in service of this team going forward and those they wanted to leave behind.  Each team member took a risk in sharing, and owning, what he/she was bringing to this new undertaking.   It was a fabulous, rich, multi-layered discussion.

I have a favorite quote I often introduce at the kick-off of a team building session: “We create the teams to which we belong.  And they, in turn, either nourish or drain us.” This quote has been attributed to Dr. Jack Gibb, an expert on team development and trust.

The truth of that sentiment has borne out in my personal and professional lives again and again.

When I first introduce that quote to teams, I often ask people to raise their hands if they’ve seen an organization’s financial performance benefit from healthy teams.  Almost every hand in the room shoots up in the air.  Then I ask the reverse: “How many of you have seen an organization’s financial performance damaged by unhealthy teams?”  Up go the same hands.

So how do we help teams nourish each other more effectively and, in turn, create better performance for their organizations?  Based on my observations of my mother and her friends, I think they’d have some valuable ideas to offer.

Improbable Meeting. Back to my over-active imagination:  what if the two groups who bookended my week had met? What simple, yet powerful, lessons might the group of friends have imparted that would have benefited that leadership team…and any team that is still finding its way to high performance?

Lessons from the Elders.  Continuing with the artistic license I’ve been taking, the following points explore the admittedly simpler pursuits and day-to-day rhythms of my mom and her friends, seeking a larger applicability to the more complex tasks involved in building an effective team in the workplace.

Let’s see how well they transfer.

1. Clarify Roles: as in many effective teams, these women have found a way to formally and informally assign roles to each other that play to their strengths (and help them manage their weaknesses). One is a master baker so she tends to bring the baked goods to their gatherings (although I’ve never had a bad dessert made by any of them!).  Another is very organized, with a head for numbers, so she is the manager of the travel fund I mentioned earlier.  Yet another is the better driver so she tends to be the chauffeur to and from the airport when one of them needs to travel out-of-state.  While they share many interests and pastimes, they find efficient ways to get a broad range of tasks done that allow them to engage in an ongoing, ambitious schedule of activities.  All without the benefit of any job titles.

2. Be Honest about Your Capabilities: I’ve heard these women speak openly and unashamedly about what they are good at…and not.  These self-assessments are based both on their individual profiles of personality traits and long-standing strengths and weaknesses as well as the changing status of their health.  This high level of self-awareness and honesty allows them to both carve up the roles that need to be fulfilled (see point #1) as well to discern who needs what support against the reality of their aging and the health challenges that come along with it.

3. Ask for and Give Help Without Keeping Score: I know of myriad, touching examples of the ways in which they ask for, and receive, help from each other.  The “help needed” has ranged from something as innocuous as finding a good cleaning lady up to help making decisions about independent living status, family conflicts, and emotional crises.  My out-of-state siblings and I have personally called upon various individuals in this group of wonderful women to be part of our extended care network for our own mother as she hit a few challenging periods of time.  And the help is given with unquestioning generosity of spirit.

4. Take Care of Each Other: These women care for each other deeply and they back it up with action.  They check in on each other with phone calls and drop food by if one of them is sick.  They visit each other in the hospital and various step-down rehab settings when an illness or injury strikes.  When my step-father was in the final stages of hospice care a few years back, one friend sat vigil with my mom for long hours on end.  They are committed to each other and the group…and they act on it, even if it means sacrificing some of their own needs.

5. Air Your Grievances and Move On: It’s not all peaches and cream in this group of friends. Interpersonal conflicts of various sizes bubble up and from what I can tell, pretty quickly get addressed through direct, one-on-one airing of the grievances.  Perhaps that’s one of the great lessons of advanced age:  time is precious so why waste it by dancing around the issues?  We could all benefit from being so tidy with our conflict resolution.

6. Have a Meaningful Purpose to Serve: These are women of purpose and enthusiasm.  They do volunteer work together: practicing weekly and then singing Oldies in area nursing homes.  Several of them are or have been hospice volunteers.  They take trips to interesting locations and send back hilarious pictures (there’s a certain hot tub shot from a trip to Branson, MO last year that defies description).  They are bound together by their desire to remain actively engaged in a meaningful life and to be connected to each other.  That bond fuels them in ways I can only guess at from the sidelines but it’s been an inspiration to watch.

Bringing it Home.  As may be clear by now, I admire what those women have built with each other.  I aspire to be like them with my own friends. And I know a good number of workplace teams, new teams and long-standing teams alike, that would benefit from applying the lessons this group of women could teach.

And isn’t that what a great team does for those around them?  Provide a model of good teaming practices to internalize and make our own.

While the personal boundaries and organizational contexts for a group of widowed friends and a workplace team are somewhat different, the humanity involved in working closely with each other in service of a deeper purpose is the same.

Perhaps we should start a movement for a “Bring Your Elder to Work Day”?

The post What My Mom and Her Friends Can Teach Us about Teamwork appeared first on Liminal Solutions.