Reacting vs. Humble Inquiry

Sometimes, I feel like I have just been talked AT.  No dialogue. No asking my perspective. One descriptor said that it feels like their boss has come into their office and said, “Do this, think this way, shut up, and go there!" There is a lot of talking AT people going on these days. No one seems to be listening.

It feels like no one has any time to listen to anyone anymore at all. We have all become experts in our own minds over the past couple of years on mRNA technology, vaccines, statistical curve flattening, etc…even though very few of us have even taken a calculus class to know what flattening a curve really means...or is it statistics?

If you are not sure, then I have made my point!  We read one article from the Washington Post written by a journalist whose editor is politically tied to a party and we count that article as completely factual. So, there is not much thinking going on these days either. Just a whole lot of people running around REACTING..

I Get it. Sort of.

At the end of our block when I was 10 years old,  there was this old house that was probably built in the early 1900s. It had been condemned by the health department with a clear sign posted on the door: DANGER KEEP OUT: BUILDING CONDEMNED.

All the kids in the neighborhood had been told by their parents to not go near that house. My dad was a construction guy and he sat me down and told me about the rusty nails that would be sticking out of the floorboards, and how the front porch was unsettled to the point it could collapse at any moment. He also seemed to be concerned that rats or some other wild animal could have taken up residence inside, as the house was nestled up against a heavily wooded area.  

At one time,  I bet this house was pretty cool. Probably the talk of the town, two stories with a pillar-supported front porch. It was about 1/2 mile from the Illinois River and sat up high enough on the hill that on a clear day you could easily see the river and likely all the way across.

But time had taken its toll on the place. We had lived in the neighborhood for three years and my grandparents had lived there for at least 20. My grandad couldn’t remember the last time someone lived in the home. No one knew for sure who owned it. The entire place was a real mystery.

But for us kids in the neighborhood, the house was one thing… haunted. That meant it was ripe for exploring as soon as one of us in the group mustered up enough courage to suggest we go poke around and see what might be inside. That kid was named Bobby.  He wasn’t a real leader for the group unless it was for things that were sure to get us all in trouble, in which case Bobby was pretty good at that. It might have been Bobby’s idea, but you really can’t blame a group of ten-year-old boys for just wanting an adventure on an otherwise hot, boring summer day, can you? What? You don’t think it is a good idea either?

Well neither did my mom nor my dad. I got two doses of the lecture on that day after my mom got the call from a man named Mr. Thompson. And then again after my dad got home and my mom told him about the phone call with Mr. Thompson. 

Reacting

Boy, could my mom lecture. This one went about half an hour from what I recall, complete with volume, tone, and pitch as she explained to me the dangers of our exploration. She mentioned words like tetanus and trespassing, neither of which would have meant anything at all to me even if they were delivered without volume, tone, or pitch. We didn’t have internet then, so I couldn’t quickly look it up to see what tetanus meant, I just had to take mom’s word for it. She was the expert. What she decided was true…and was what we went with. If this lecture was a court of law, mom was both the prosecutor and the judge. Where was Bobby when I needed him?

And the verdict…Guilty! (Before I even had the chance to take the stand.)

Mr. Thompson was a truck driver who just happened to be home that day between hauls and saw us poking around. He called all our parents. Mr. Thompson was an otherwise nice guy, a bit nosey perhaps, but a nice guy. However, in my case, he was an eyewitness. I was doomed. His credibility was impeccable. 

Of course, I denied it, but I have to give mom credit. As a prosecutor she was good. “Why would Mr. Thompson lie about that…why would he even care if it was not true?”I had no response. I thought about attacking Mr. Thompson’s character. Probably good impulse control at that point. Had I said anything at that point it would have for sure been held against me.

The penalty…Grounded! Crap. Grounding was the worst.

“Mom, couldn’t you just beat me?” (This was a legitimate form of punishment 50 years ago!) My logic was that although a beating would hurt, it would end, and then it was over. Grounding a 10-year-old boy was painful torture meant for thieves and murderers.  Really what that meant was that I was home and in the house when dad got home. Crap. Beating and grounding. That is not fair or just. 

The thing was, from my perspective, no one seemed to care about me. I swear the only thing my parents cared about was what the neighbors might think if they saw me in that old house. Or what if the police came…what then? I could have gotten arrested. Worse yet, the neighbors would see the police in our driveway. I think my mom would have rather me just be arrested.

Not to mention all the potential health risks or physical danger if something happened like the roof collapsing on me. I can still hear Dad saying "You know the pillars that support the weight of that roof could just collapse and then you would be crushed?”

You have to know one thing. I really love my parents. My dad has been gone for over 20 years now and I miss him a lot. What I wouldn’t give to get a lecture on how to best protect myself from the dangers that lurk around every corner. Most of the time my mom and dad were actually pretty good listeners…except when they reacted with angry or scared emotions.

Humble Inquiry

There are a lot of people running around right now angry and scared.

People are angry that they still have to come to work at the office, while others work from home.

People who had to furlough are scared because they have house payments, car payments, insurance payments, and utility payments, and they had no margin in their lives even when they had full incomes. 

When people are scared or angry they can get all kinds of emotionally unsettled. I really love the concept Edgar Schein wrote about a number of years ago called Humble Inquiry. If you are a regular blog reader you will know this book is a favorite of mine. The subtitle is what is really brilliant: “The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling.”

When people get all fired up angry or scared they stop thinking and just start reacting. As a leader, you need good impulse control and not to react back at them at that moment.  What I coach leaders to do in this instance is to practice some “humble inquiry” vs. reacting.

1. Minimize your own preconceptions. You are about to get curious about someone who is scared. Clear your mind and shift from judging to observing. 

2. Keep your questions for them open-ended. You want to explore with the scared person what is it that is really scaring them. 

3. Practice giving up control of the conversation. You are not trying to lead them anywhere specific. You are there to just help them process what they are experiencing.

What might it be like if we all just got a little more curious about where folks are coming from these days? They may not ever tell you the real reason they are scared, but they will remember you as an excellent listener, if you practice some humble inquiry vs. reacting.

4 Strategies to Prevent Burnout

I'm trying a little something new today and I have recorded a short video for you to enjoy in place of my usual written blog. Click below to check it out:

Additional blog posts that are related to burnout are listed here:

• One Easy Way to Avoid Burnout as a Leader

• 3-Step Recipe for a Productivity Reset

• Are You Dealing Effectively With Emotional Exhaustion?

As always, I welcome your thoughts and feedback.

Thank you for reading and listening!

Vacationing Well & Returning Better

I hope you enjoyed your time away over the Thanksgiving holiday!

Please enjoy this rerun from a couple of years ago when I intended to take a vacation, but instead worked the entire time. Maybe some of you can relate…

If there is one thing I am known for as an executive coach, it is ensuring my clients hear this clear message: when you are on vacation, you are resting.

There has been a lot of work done to show that we are actually able to perform better when we are practicing good self-care. Part of good self-care is that we learn how to rest.

I really love how Parker Palmer puts it, “Self-care is never a selfish act - it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do it not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch.”

OUCH.  That one hurts me personally. So much so that I think I need to apologize to all of you who trust me as a coach and in the work of developing the leaders in your organization.

Why?

Because I just had a “vacation” and instead of resting, I worked.

Usually, when I am on vacation I will catch up on a lot of reading, reflecting, and journaling. Mostly how I rest is that I will have fun with my wife and my friends and family, we play golf, go out for dinner, and play games.

This last vacation I took, I did the second thing; spent time with friends and family playing golf and board games.

What I did not do was spend any time reflecting or reading or journaling.

Instead, I had client calls, and planning meetings, and workshop preparation. 

DANG! Why did I do that?

In his book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Peter Scazzero calls this out as the importance of silence and solitude. He found in his own leadership journey how important this was, not only when taking chunks of time out, like a vacation, but integrating silence and solitude as part of his daily routine. Scazzero writes that he slowed the pace of his life down from working six days a week (about 70 hours) to five days and 40 hours. Over the years, this slowing down has given him time for solitude and reflection.  

The counter-intuitive aspect of this is not always obvious - that this slowing down is actually something that can help us go faster. It can clear our minds. It can refresh us. 

The parallel for me is sleep. When I get a good night’s sleep of 8 hours, I am ready to take on my day. If for some reason I only sleep 4 hours, I am groggy and sluggish the rest of the day. 

While that is an example of a 24-hour cycle; when we put our weeks and months together the logic is the same. 

Rest And Emotional Regulation

By now most of you know the story of the part of our brain called the amygdala. It is the sight of emotional learning and emotional memory. It is the part of the brain’s fear circuit and can trigger things like anger and aggression. When you do not rest enough, or well, this part of your brain doesn’t get the reset it needs from all the day’s activity.

Research has shown that sleep-deprived people show a 60 percent greater activation of the amygdala during waking hours than those who are not sleep-deprived. In his book, Successful Aging, Daniel Levitin writes that “when your mom told you that you were crabby when you didn’t get enough sleep, she was probably right.” (As a side note, Levitin states that sleep deprivation is strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease.)

The same kind of rest we need every night is needed in more of a yearly pattern as well. As leaders, we need to be able to disengage, to be silent, to think, to become distracted. There is energy in this when we reengage. It is like waking up from a good night’s rest and having your Mom say, “Wow! Look at you! You sure on in a good mood. You must have had a good night’s sleep!”

Remedy

Edgar Schein, in his book Humble Inqury, makes a most salient point in this area when it comes to the real problem. All of this busyness affects our ability to regulate emotion and gets us into a state of mindless hurrying. Schein writes, “If I hurry I do not pay enough attention to what is going on, and that makes mistakes more likely.”

DANG!

Why didn’t I just take my vacation and disengage so I could be in a frame to reduce mistakes? It all seems so simple.

More importantly, perhaps, then not paying attention is that I may miss new opportunities that are right in front of me. Because I am not rested, I mindlessly hurry by them.

For me, I agree with Schein in that learning how to run faster is not where I need to be in my life, but that I need to slow down in order to make sure I have my full thinking and observational mind available to me and can take “full stock of reality.”

My next vacation is scheduled over the Christmas holiday. Please know I will not be available. But also know that when I come back in January, you will get a better version of me. 

There is a whole lot of this and not much of that going on these days...

Throughout the past 6 weeks, I feel like I have just been talked at. 

No dialogue. No asking my perspective.

It feels like my boss has come into my office and said, “Do this, think this way, shut up, and go here!"

There is a lot of talking AT people going on these days. No one seems to be listening.

Somehow, it feels like no one has any time to listen to anyone anymore at all. We have all become experts in our own minds on mRNA technology, vaccines, Remedesivir, statistical curve flattening…even though very few of us have even taken a calculus class to know what flattening a curve really means...or is it statistics?

If you are not sure, then I have made my point!  We read one article from the Washington Post written by a journalist whose editor is politically tied to a party and we count that article as completely factual. And so there is just not much thinking going on these days either. Just a whole lot of people running around reacting.

I get it. Sort of.

You see at the end of our block when I was 10 years old,  there was this old house that was probably built in the early 1900s. It had been condemned by the health department with a clear sign posted on the door:

DANGER KEEP OUT

BUILDING CONDEMNED

All the kids in the neighborhood had been told by their parents to not go near that house. My dad was a construction guy and he sat me down and told me about the rusty nails that would be sticking out of the floorboards, and how the front porch was unsettled to the point it could just collapse at any moment. He also seemed to be concerned that rats or some other wild animal could have taken up residence inside, as the house was nestled up against a heavily wooded area.  

At one time,  I bet this house was pretty cool. Probably the talk of the town. Two stories with a pillar supported front porch. It was about 1/2 mile from the Illinois River and sat up high enough on the hill that on a clear day you could easily see the river and likely all the way across.

But time had taken its toll on the place. We had lived in the neighborhood for 3 years and my grandparents had lived there at least 20. My grandad couldn’t remember the last time someone lived in the home. No one knew for sure who owned it. The entire place was a real mystery.

But for us kids in the neighborhood, the house was one thing… haunted.

That meant it was ripe for exploring as soon as one of us in the group mustered up enough courage to suggest we go poke around and see what might be inside. That kid was Bobby. 

Not a real leader for the group, unless it was for things that were sure to get us all in trouble, in which case Bobby was pretty good at that.

It might have been Bobby’s idea, but you really can’t blame a group of 10 year old boys for just wanting an adventure on an otherwise hot, boring summer day, can you?

What? You don’t think it is a good idea either? Well neither did my mom nor my dad.

I got two doses of lecture on that day after my mom got the call from Mr. Thompson. And then again after my dad got home and my mom told him about the phone call with Mr. Thompson. 

Boy, could my mom lecture. This one went about half an hour from what I recall, complete with volume, tone, and pitch as she explained to me the dangers of our exploration. She mentioned words like tetanus and trespassing, neither of which would have meant anything at all to me even if they were delivered without volume, tone, or pitch. In that day we had no internet so I couldn’t look up what tetanus meant, I just had to take mom’s word for it. She was the expert. What she decided was true…it was what we went with. If this lecture was a court of law, mom was both the prosecutor and the judge. Where was Bobby when I needed him?

And the verdict…Guilty! (Before I even had the chance to take the stand.)

Mr. Thompson was a truck driver who just happened to be home that day between hauls and saw us poking around. He called all our parents. Mr. Thompson was an otherwise nice guy, a bit nosey perhaps, but a nice guy.

However, in my case he was an eye witness. I was doomed. His credibility was impeccable. 

Of course, I denied it, but I have to give mom credit. As a prosecutor she was good. “Why would Mr. Thompson lie about that…why would he even care if it was not true.?”

I had no response. I thought about attacking Mr. Thompson’s character. Probably good impulse control at that point. Had I said anything at that point it would have for sure been held against me.

The penalty…grounded. Crap. Grounding was the worst.

“Mom, couldn’t you just beat me?” (This was a legitimate form of punishment 50 years ago!)

My logic was that although a beating would hurt, it would end, and then it was over. Grounding a 10-year-old boy was painful torture meant for thieves and murderers. 

Really what that meant was that I was home and in the house when dad got home. Crap. Beating and grounding. That is not fair or just. 

The thing was, from my perspective no one seemed to care about me. I swear the only thing my parents cared about is what the neighbors might think if they saw me in that old house. Or what if the police came…what then? You could get arrested. Worse yet, the neighbors would see the police in our driveway. I think mom would have rather me just be arrested.

Not to mention all the potential health risks or physical danger if something happened like the roof collapsing on me. I can still hear dad say "you know the pillars that support the weight of that roof could just collapse and then you would be crushed?”

You have to know one thing. I really love my parents. Dad has been gone almost 20 years now and I miss him a lot. What I wouldn’t give to have a lecture on how to best protect myself from the dangers that lurk around every corner. Most of the time mom and dad were actually pretty good listeners…except when they were angry or scared.

Humble Inquiry

There are a lot of people running around right now angry and scared.

People who are angry they have to come to work while the office types all work from home.

People who you had to furlough are scared because they have house payments, car payments, insurance payments, utility payments, and they had no margin in their lives even when they had full incomes. 

When people are scared or angry they can get all kinds of emotional unsettled. I really love the concept Edgar Schein wrote about a number of years ago called Humble Inquiry. If you are a regular reader you will know this book is a favorite of mine. The subtitle is what is really brilliant, “The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling.”

When people get all fired up angry or scared they stop thinking and just start reacting. As a leader, you need good impulse control not to react back at them in the moment.  What I coach leaders to do in this instance is to practice some Humble Inquiry.  

Here are some thoughts on how to do this:

1. Minimize your own preconceptions. You are about to get curious about someone who is scared. Clear your mind and shift from judging to observing. 

2. Keep your questions for them open-ended. You want to explore with the scared person what is it that is really scaring them. 

3. Practice giving up control of the conversation. You are not trying to lead them anywhere specific. You are there to just help them process what they are experiencing.

What might it be like if we all just got a little more curious about where folks are coming from these days? They may not ever tell you the real reason they are scared, but they will remember you as an excellent listener.

Unprecedented...Really?

I noticed something about the conversations I was having with my clients last week. I was repeatedly using a word that, until recent weeks, I don’t think I used all that much.

Unprecedented. 

The word means “never done or known before.”

On one hand, there are a lot of specific things I am experiencing for the first time. 

For example:

• This is the first global pandemic I have been through in my lifetime

• According to the Wall Street Journal on April 16, 2020, over 22 million people sought unemployment benefits

• People are wearing masks at the grocery store

• It is hard to purchase paper towels and toilet paper

• A drop of 2997 points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average

• I can’t fly to Peoria and have coffee with my mom at her kitchen table

• I can’t fly to Ohio and hug my two grandbabies! 

All of these seemingly unprecedented events were starting to cause me some stress. I could feel it all building. As I would think about the pandemic and the many people dying, I get a little stressed because I don’t want to get sick and die. I go to the grocery store and see all the people wearing masks and I can not buy paper towels and I get a little stressed.  When I read the news at night, half of the stock market pundits say the market is going to recover and the other half say it is going back down. This uncertainty adds stress.  I can see my two precious granddaughters on FaceTime, but I cannot hug them…wanna talk about stress?!

Pretty soon, I can feel all of this stress adding up. I can actually start to feel the weight of it all. I think it is starting to affect my mental game, my positive attitude, my overall optimism.

Then it hit me like a blinding flash of light, what I know about stress is killing me.

That last statement might seem a little odd, but hang with me. I want to unpack it with you.

Henry Thompson, in his book, The Stress Effect, draws this conclusion, “When stress increases, cognitive and emotional intelligence are compromised. Perception changes and, in many cases, become less accurate and more biased.”  When complexity increases and our control decreases we do not see things as they really are and we mentally run to our familiar comfort zones.

And if that is not enough the Mayo Clinic cites body, mood, and behavioral effects like headache, anxiety, and overeating, along with stomach upset, feeling overwhelmed, and exercising less.

Like you, the last two paragraphs were not new information for me. I know that stress affects my decision making and I know it makes me anxious and causes me to feel overwhelmed at times. I also know that if I let myself slip, I will take on other unhealthy behaviors like overeating and sleep difficulties. 

What I know about stress is indeed killing me.

As I was feeling the weight of all this stress, I came to realize that I needed a very different response. So, in my journaling this morning, I spent some time just writing and trying to figure out all this seemingly unprecedented stuff, and the stress it was causing me.

Out of nowhere, another blinding flash of light: is this event that we are experiencing really unprecedented?

Just Hear Me Out

At first glance when thinking about the impact of Covid-19, there might be an argument for describing it with the word “unprecedented.”

I don’t ever remember not being able to go out and have dinner in a restaurant. Certainly, that has never happened before in my life. From my very first memories as a kid growing up I could go into Steak and Shake with my Aunt Betty and order a fried egg sandwich on white bread and those classic french fries.

But as I was thinking about this micro event of dining in at Steak and Shake back in the 1960’s, it really isn’t the dining in the restaurant, but more about my ability to have control to do what I want, when I want.

Yet none of us always gets to do what we want, when we want.

Is this unprecedented feeling I am having really all that unprecedented? Or is it a lack of control I am experiencing in the moment?

I have been pretty open in this column, and in my conversations with my clients, and even on the Facebook Watch Parties (sign up for my next one here) I have been hosting about how I am starting my day. In fact, just yesterday I was on a coaching call and a client said to me, “So, Scott, tell me how you are starting your day?”

Here is what I told him:

• I am walking the dog

• I am exercising

• I am having coffee and reading my Bible 

• I am spending some time in quiet reflection and meditation

• I then go into my office and start working

Then I told him I am really digging this routine. One thing I did have to change was looking at the news. I open the Newsfeed on my iPhone and skim the headlines to see if there is something new or breakthrough that happened overnight. Then I close the app.  I don’t want to infect my day with a bunch of news I already know is bad.

Why am I telling you all this, you might be asking?

The Point

Today I am in my morning routine and reading my Bible and one of the verses in the study I am doing is Ecclesiastes 1:9 which reads, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

I really had to stop dead in my tracks.

How could something be unprecedented and yet there be nothing new under the sun?

While the microcosm of what we are all experiencing right now might be new, the lack of control we are experiencing certainly is not.

The inability to control our situations or our circumstances is not new. For centuries, people have had to adapt and change because of what is going on around them. And for centuries, these events have been stressful.

What I am asking myself is, “Do I have to succumb to the stress of the situation?” 

What I know about stress is killing me, and if I don’t change something, the stress just might do me in.  

I will have a free tool for you to download after my Facebook WatchParty event this Thursday at noon Eastern time.  I hope you will be able to join me!  I have a very special guest who will join me to help us continue this discussion around stress. See you Thursday!

5 Strategies to Be Resilient in Stressful Times

I don’t know about you, but this last week was a tough one for me. Not hard in a physical way, but more just feeling the weight of what is going on in our world.

Anytime I go through a tough time in my life I am always looking for lessons that I can learn.  I really think it is during the tough times in life that we can learn the most about what we need to do to live in wisdom.  Last week I wrote quite a bit on the subject of Fear and Wisdom. If you missed it, you can grab that blog by clicking here.  I also did a free tool download to help you make wise choices in your life and if you missed that tool you can click here for the free download. 

One of those tough lessons for me happened early in my college career. But I have to give you a little historical context for it to make sense. 

In high school, I loved chemistry. I really think it was a combination of my teacher, Mr. Valosio, and being able to have a Bunson Burner to play with during the labs. Chemistry just sort of made sense to me for some odd reason. It was fun because all the known elements in the universe were pictured on a poster behind where Mr. Valosio taught. All you had to do was combine two or more of them and “Bam” you had something like water. Combining Carbon and Hydrogen gave way to the very backbone of all life.  Again, I know I am weird, but I just got into it.  

Hence, like almost anything you enjoy spending time doing, you tend to do pretty well at it. My high school chemistry grades were always pretty good. Just to be clear, my grades in other subjects were not always as good as chemistry, which I think puzzled the guidance counselor when I was making applications to college. She could be puzzled, I really didn’t care, I just liked chemistry.

So when I went off to college and was in Chemistry 101, the lectures were really quite boring. I had already learned everything the professor was talking about, so I decided that attendance at that 8 am class every Monday thru Friday was…well…optional. No one took attendance. There were 400 kids in the lecture hall. I already knew everything they were talking about, so I decided an extra hour's sleep never hurt anyone.

The first test came around about 3 weeks or so into the semester.  I went to class that day to take the test.   

You couldn’t tell by the grade I got — a “D.”

Mr. Valosio would have been so disappointed in me. I was so disappointed in myself. I loved chemistry. How could this happen?

Part of the deal in Chemistry 101 was if you did not get an “A” on the first test, you had to make an appointment with your lab instructor to go over the exam. So I did. 

I walked into Professor Brown’s lab and showed her my test. It was embarrassing for me. Her first question for me cut right to the point.  “How much did you study for this test,” she asked?  

“I didn’t” was my honest reply. I proceeded to tell her I had all this stuff in high school and I already knew it…Her second statement cut right to the point, “Obviously you don’t know it” she said.  “I recommend you find some discipline in your life, Mr. Livingston, or you might just find yourself not a part of the Drake Pharmacy program much longer.”

Some very well-timed words from professor Brown. Quite a stressful moment for me in my young college career.  But one I learned from.

5 Strategies for Being Resilient in Stressful Times

I think anytime we go through something difficult, it is all about learning. In order to learn, we have to develop some resiliency.  As I reflect on the conversation I had with Professor Brown back then, it would have been easy for me to just quit. Pharmacy was a difficult major. No one would have blamed me and I am sure I could have done something that would not have required an 8am class every day of the week (which I had, by the way, for every semester except one my entire college career).

I know things are tough for you right now.  Tough maybe not physically, but for sure emotionally. Everyone is experiencing this COVID 19 in a unique way.  So I thought perhaps some strategies might be useful as you navigate these difficult times.

1. Reframe the context. Most of us are sheltering in place these days. Instead of a burden and feeling the heaviness of being at home, why not make the most of it? My wife and I are taking the opportunity in the evenings to connect with some old friends over FaceTime.  I have one client whose family cooked dinner together over Zoom. They all had the same ingredients for the meal and they talked to each other while they cooked, then ate dinner together.

2. Choose your focus.  I am really trying to limit the amount of time I am looking at the news. I am addicted to the story; the epidemiology, the race for a vaccine, the updates on treatments, how it spreads, the whole thing. What I have to do is choose to only look at the news once a day. I do this in the evening after I finish working. I choose to start my day reading scripture and listening to an inspirational or informative podcast. I want to be in the right frame of mind when I start working.

3. Find the good.  There is a lot of seriousness these days. People are dying. People have lost their jobs. Businesses are going under, some to never return. A lot of seriousness. But just because something is serious doesn’t mean we cannot find the good. I am not saying there is something good about someone getting sick or dying. I don’t want you to think I am that dark or so optimistic that I don’t live in the real world. What I am asking you to consider here is whether in the midst of all of this, is there something good?  I had a client tell me the other day that he no longer has a 1.5hr commute, so after work, he and his 10-year-old daughter are going for a walk. Now that is a commute that has value!  How can you find the good in what is happening in your world?

4. Helping or Harming? Consider your thought life.  Are my thoughts and emotions helping me or harming me right now?  I was reading the news the other day I started to get a bit anxious about the impact that COVID 19 might have on my business. What if my clients started to close? What if there was not enough business when things returned? None of that thinking was helping me. So I sat down and wrote out a one-page plan on what I need to do to stay engaged with my clients. If you really are in danger, it is helpful to be afraid. If you are really not in danger, then a plan is a much better idea.

5. Make stress your friend.  We all have stress. If you are feeling it, then it is trying to communicate something to you.  If you are feeling cooped up and it is stressing you out, then go outside for a walk. I know its raining, who cares, take an umbrella. If you are feeling lonely, like most of us are these days, then pick up the phone and call a friend. You have friends. If you don’t have a friend, pick up the phone and call me. My point here is that your stress is telling you something. Look it straight in the eye and do something productive and positive that will help to make it go down. 

You don’t have to do all 5 of these. This is not a list of steps to walk through. If you are feeling stressed, pick the one you think might be the most helpful.

I picked up the phone after my meeting with Professor Brown and called Mr. Volosio. He talked some sense into me. I thank him to this day for helping me in my time of need and for graduating from pharmacy school. 

Next Steps

If you are interested in learning more about these 5 strategies, I’d like to extend an invitation to participate in a (4) session development opportunity, facilitated by me, utilizing Facebook’s video streaming platform. I guarantee there will be no sales pitch or advertising - just content. You can join one of them or all of them, as each session is independent of the others. Join as many as you would like. I would love to have you!

All you need in order to participate is a Facebook account (free to create if you don’t already have one) and a desire to connect and learn. Over the 4 weeks, I plan to cover topics such as:

•  “5 Strategies for Staying Resilient During Times of Ambiguous Change”  

• “What You Know About Stress is Killing You” 

• “Making Wise Decisions in Scary Circumstances”

• “Leading with Emotional Intelligence When Stress is High”

To begin, simply CLICK HERE and request to join my private Facebook group. All content will be facilitated within this group each Thursday at 12pm Eastern Time for 4 weeks, beginning Thursday, April 16th and ending Thursday, May 7th. 

If you know of a leader who might benefit from this opportunity, feel free to forward them this email. I would love to connect!

Is it Fear or Wisdom?

To say there is a lot going on in our world right now is likely the understatement of the year!

I find myself going from big picture, what is happening across the world with Coronavirus, to the minutia of checking my bank account daily to make sure I have the funds I need to pay my staff and business partners.

Thoughts like:

• Will this be over and will folks be back to work by the end of April? If so, I think I have the resources to weather that storm. The fact is, I have more than enough to make it through April, so should I be generous to others who are really struggling. 

• If this current crisis goes through May, my retained earnings should be enough to carry me through, but maybe I should back off my generosity a bit.

• If my business is not as interrupted as others, what should my response be?

• If my business tanks because of Coronavirus, how should I respond?

• Is this an opportunity to launch into some new areas of work I have always thought about but never really had the time to focus on?

I am sure you are evaluating your work, and, for that matter, your personal life as well.  

• Some of you have fallen in love with working from home and are trying to think of ways to approach your boss to lobby for a more permanent home office deal.

• Some of you can’t wait to get back to the socialization of your team; this working from home is driving you crazy.

• Some of you thought your house was maybe too big for the number of people who now live there, only to find your college kids all came home and now you actually could double your square footage and still be cramped.

• Some of you had been thinking about giving up your gym membership to save money only to realize you would now pay double just to go workout with a coach.

• Some of you have learned to order your groceries online and just drive up to have someone load them in your car.

One thing is for sure, Coronavirus will cause many of us to rethink portions of our lives, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

As we rethink our personal and business lives let’s make sure we are doing it with wisdom and not out of fear.

What is it that you are afraid of? If I do not have any retained earnings in my business and if I am not getting any new work, then I should be afraid that my business might not make it. That is legitimate fear. Those are the facts.

How This works with Leaders

When I am coaching clients and we are trying to discern whether something is wise or not we always look at the facts. 

• Not what I emotionally want the facts to be. 

• Not the longing desires of my heart.

• Not what it would take to please the person I am trying to impress.

• Not irrational propaganda or rumors I might have heard.

No! What are the facts?

When I ask the question “What are you afraid of?” I get back answers like:

• I don’t know

• I am not really sure

• That _________ could happen if the stars align exactly right across every galaxy in the universe.

That is when I know we are dealing with a fear or an anxiety that is not going to help us make a wise decision.

As I am thinking about my own business and how I am going make it to the other side of Coronavirus, I am looking at how long I can pay everyone and what kind of new business I can bring in. I am putting those numbers in a spreadsheet, just like I always have, and I am pulling out my journal and I am reflecting on what those numbers are telling me. 

If my fear is an overarching, overwhelming sense that the world is collapsing, that is not helping me. We need to make decisions not on what I emotionally project might happen, but what the facts are telling me. I have developed a flow chart - if this happens, I will do A. If that happens, I will do B. The decision is already made and is informed by the facts of the situation. 

What I am trying to communicate here is if you are trying to discern between fear and wisdom, the facts of the situation are your friend.

Here is a little checklist you can use to discern if your decision is full of wisdom or full of fear. If you use this list you will most always end up with a decision that is much more wise than it is fearful. I used this model years ago when I wrote my dissertation on wisdom and am so thankful for Dr. Vern Ludden who conceptualized it way back in 2009.

• Start with what you THINK the facts are

• Think CRITICALLY about the facts

• How do these facts AUTHENTICALLY align with your character?

• What have been your past EXPERIENCES with these facts?

• As you REFLECT on these experiences, what are the facts telling you?

• Do you have the COURAGE to put the facts into action?

• Have you pressure tested the facts with a larger COMMUNITY of advisors?

• What did the above DELIBERATIONS tell you about the facts?

• As you COLLABORATE with others do you get a positive impression about the facts?

• Some of you who bring SPIRITUALITY into your fact discernment will call upon God to show you direction

Now you are ready to EVALUATE what you THINK the facts are.

Using an informed process like the one I outlined above can help you decide if you are using wisdom in your decision making, or if you are subjecting yourself to irrational fear or anxiety.

I wish you and your family all the best as you navigate this current crisis.

Give Me 1 More Week and I Will Improve Your Stress Resilience - Making Stress Your Friend

Since this post will hit your inbox a day or two prior to Christmas, I am going to keep it relatively short.

Over the last few weeks I have been working through a series on describing the habits I have noticed over the years of stress resilient people. You know the types, it seems like their world is caving in around them and yet they have an ability to remain cool under pressure. If you’d like to catch up or review the previous posts, you can find them by clicking here.

If you don’t want to click back and forth, I will give you the first 4 steps in improving your stress resilience:

1. Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is going to happen to you. You are not immune to adversity, and there is no vaccine. Reframe your attitude from “Why did this happen to me?” to “Why not me?” Adversity is as much a part of life as joy.

1. The second lesson I have learned about being more stress resilient is when you are undergoing adversity, to carefully choose where to focus your attention. When things come into our lives that don’t go the way we want them to, we are meant to learn something from them.  But we can get so wrapped up in the wrong little details, or in the emotions surrounding the event, that we can miss the learning. Choose wisely where you focus your attention.

2.  The the third observation I have made about people who seem to have high stress resilience is they have an ability to find the good in the circumstance or the people. How they frame life seems to be very appreciative.

3. The fourth thing that I have noticed about people who are resilient in times of stress and ambiguity is that they can answer one key question for themselves. The question is this: “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?”  Our focus as leaders needs to be on the kinds of things that will actually help me instead of making my “stress hole” even bigger.

My perspective

The final post in this series is the most important of all. The reason is, for example, you can do your best to ask yourself, “is what I am doing helping or harming me?” which is the fourth suggestion I made to improve your stress resilience. And indeed, if you focus on this question, your resilience to stress should improve. 

However, what I have observed is people who ask themselves the question, “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?” will work really hard to convince themselves that the harm they are actually doing to themselves is not really hurting them. 

This is why human connection is so important in creating stress resilience. In one of the most impactful studies I have reviewed on the subject of stress resilience actually has to do with living longer. Poulin, Brown Dillard Smith (2013) out of the University of Buffalo monitored participant mortality and time to death for 5 years by way of newspaper obituaries and monthly state death-record tapes.

Mortality revealed a significant interaction between helping behavior and stressful events. 

Specifically, stress did not predict mortality risk among individuals who provided help to others in the past year, but stress did predict mortality among those who did not provide help to others. 

Bottom line is, creating human connection and helping others can help you live longer.

And not just creating human connection, but when you do, listen to those who you connect with. 

Story

My wife and I were back home in Peoria, Illinois this past weekend to celebrate Christmas with my mom. It was a really nice weekend connecting with mom and my siblings. We spent the afternoon together on both Saturday and Sunday. At the end of our time together on Sunday, my wife and I went to a Christmas show at one of the local churches in town. ‘

When we went into the church the weather was a bit cold and the sky was overcast.  About 2 hours later when we came out of the show, there was about 2.5 inches of snow on the ground and near blizzard driving conditions. It took us quite a while to get out of the church parking lot, and once we got on the main roads they were snow packed and very slippery to drive on. 

I have been driving on snow and ice since I was 14 years old in my dad’s old pickup truck, usually in a parking lot somewhere just to get some practice. So, I know how to drive in pretty treacherous conditions.

However, about 7 years ago my wife and I got out of the midwest snow belt, and moved ourselves to sunny Florida.  Not much snow to drive through in the Sunshine state! 

Needless to say I was a bit nervous driving, not as much for me, but as we made our way back to where we were staying there were cars all over in ditches. The result, no doubt, of forgetting the important rules of driving on snow and ice. My nerves had more to do with not knowing the skill level of other people driving then knowing myself what to do and not do. 

It was all a bit stressful, to say the least.

I was really glad I had my wife along with me because her human connection really made me want to make stress my friend and listen to what my body was telling me. Having Kim in the passenger seat next to me heightened my own sense of self-awareness and self-preservation. 

I could feel the stress with every quarter-mile that we drove. Sometimes the back end of the car sliding, sometimes the front wheels just not get anyone traction on the wet surface. Feeling the stress and embracing it helped me in the moment to realize this was not a time for heroics. Not at all a time to “see how fast the car could go” or “how close could I get to the car in front of me.” My stress was actually my friend in that it was telling me to keep a safe distance from other vehicles. 

I also really tried to listen to my wife as she became my copilot, searching for the best route for us to take and making sure I was still on a drivable road surface.  I think so many times we get into stressful situations and our knee jerk reaction is to just bear down and do it all ourselves. This is a time, when you are making stress your friend, to really listen to others.

This listening can really help you answer the question “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?” If I am willing to listen to others input then I am less likely to make a mistake; convincing myself that something that is really destined to harm me will help me.

My Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Stress Resilience

In summary here are my top 5 ways for you to improve your stress resilience

1. Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is just going to happen to you. 

1.  Choose where to focus your attention.

2.  Find the good in the circumstance or the people. 

3. Ask Yourself; “Is what I am doing helping or harming me?”  

4. Make Stress Your Friend

Now go out there and have a stress free Christmas and a very happy new year!

Give Me 3 More Weeks and I will Improve Your Stress-Resilience: Find the Good

Over the last few weeks, I have been working through a blog series on describing the habits I have noticed throughout the years of stress-resilient people.

You know the types, it seems like their world is caving in around them, yet they have an ability to remain cool under pressure. If you missed them, you can find the first two posts in the series here.

If you don’t want to click back and forth I will just give you the first steps in improving your stress resilience:

1. Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is just going to happen to you. You are not immune to adversity, and there is no vaccine, per se. Reframe your attitude from “Why did this happen to me?” to “why not me?” Adversity is as much a part of life as joy.

2. The second lesson I have learned about being more stress-resilient is when you are undergoing adversity, carefully choose where to focus your attention. When things come into our lives that don’t go the way we want them to, we are meant to learn something from them. But we can get so wrapped up in the wrong little details, or in the emotions surrounding the event, that we can miss the learning. Choose wisely where you focus your attention.

These two posts lead me to the third observation I have made about people who seem to have high stress-resilience;

They have the ability to find the good in the circumstance or the people. How they frame life seems to be very appreciative. Before we unpack this, let’s go over some data on the topic just to cement the need.

Coping Successfully With Stressful Life Events

There is a really good chance, even if you are someone who is fairly stress-resilient, that as you are reading this, the person on your right AND the person on your left is not so good.

A recent (2013) survey of adults and teens commissioned by the American Psychological Association showed 65% of people said managing their stress is very or extremely important (I found this a little lower than I would have thought), but just 38% said they do at least a good job of managing stressful situations.

So, we as humans think something is important and we recognize we are not very good at it. And for way too many of us, that is where the story ends. But not for people who are more stress-resilient. And it turns out that for most of us, it can be a simple shift in perspective.

Lets examine the most prevalent emotion people experience in stressful situations…Anxiety.

There is data to suggest that 1 in 5 Americans will suffer from a diagnosed anxiety disorder in a given year. Anxiety is the most prevalent emotional stress response.

A common definition of Anxiety is "…facing an uncertain threat.” We see something in our future, either real or perceived, that we don’t know or understand as going to do us harm. A situation or a context like this will cause us to feel anxious.

Our anxious feeling is telling us something about our uncertainty in the situation and often gets compounded by other negative thoughts or emotions until we get ourselves so worked up that we can not even remember what the root cause of our anxiety really is.

A Personal Story

Let’s play with this definition for anxiety a bit and see if we can build some stress-resilient muscle in the process.

I’ll offer up a personal story as a frame for our learning.

This time of year always creates a bit of an anxious time for me as a solopreneur. Many of the coaching and training engagements that have been running in 2019 will be coming to an end. Many of my clients are changing approaches in how they are using services like the ones I offer.

I can become anxious about where my business is going to come from in 2020.

5 Things to notice in this short story.

1. The main character in the story is me.

2. The story I created in my head is that business is uncertain (see the definition of anxiety).

3. The story I created has a threatening tone (see the definition of anxiety).

4. The timing context of the story is a perception I am feeling.

5. Clients are changing so that means they won’t need me any longer.

Being Stress Resilient

People who are stress-resilient have adaptive resources in both cognitive and emotional arenas to be able to handle the story they are perceiving.

One of the most important adaptive strategies is to find the good in the situation.

I know what you might be saying because I have said it myself…”What could possibly be good about losing clients or business in 2020?” Frankly NOTHING! But we are not working at the right level to deal with the anxiety. There is nothing good about losing business, feeling rejected, or having to experience lean times in business. Please hear me; I am not one of those Pollyanna overly optimistic leader development guys. You know the type, they just don’t seem to live in the same world as I do when it comes to being anxious about losing something important.

What I am advocating for here is letting go of the outcome.

Since what I am projecting in my stressful and anxious situation has not happened yet, there is time for me to do something about it. In essence, I need to Find the Good in the inputs that will ultimately drive the outcome.

Focus on Quality Inputs

If I can let go of the outcome, just for a moment, that is causing my anxious feeling and focus on Finding the Good in the inputs, will this lessen or eliminate my anxiety?

That becomes the central question for people who have the ability to be resilient.

What I am going to do is to Find the Good in the 5 elements of my short story above and see if I feel less anxious. Here they are repeated with a reframing of each of them to find the good:

5 Things to notice in this short story.

1. The main character in the story is me. This business has never been about me. It is about the clients I serve and the good we do for them. Part of my work here is to get the story off of me and to focus on those I serve. In doing so, my needs, whatever they are, will be met.

2. The story I created in my head is that business is uncertain (see the definition for anxiety). Business is complex, it is not uncertain. Now more than ever in recorded history organizations need leadership development. My clients are good people who can use my objective perspective on developing leaders in their organizations.

3. The story I created has a threatening tone (see the definition for anxiety). The threatening tone I am picking up is one of perceived loss. That this loss will mean a loss of income, so I won’t be able to meet the needs of my business. I may have to close my operation and do something else that I don’t love near as much. I hope you see in this how a threat can cycle down into a negative vortex of things that are so far from being real at the moment. But this vortex of fear can become paralyzing, and none of it is real. The good in the story is for me to get excited about some of the plans I have for 2020, rather than how I can make my reality less horrible than I am seeing it. I want to be excited about the opportunities I have and not just see how I can squeak by.

4. The timing context of the story is a perception I am feeling. Coming to an end feels like such a threat. While I do have some engagements that are ending; 75% of my business comes from existing clients. So that I may have individual clients that will rotate off my schedule, but that does not mean that my relationship with the organization has to end. The good in this is that nothing is ending, it is just an opportunity to start over and learn something new.

5. Clients are changing so that means they won’t need me any longer. My clients are changing. Fact. But this does not mean they no longer need a service like the one I provide. Change doesn’t have to be a threat. It can be a golden opportunity. I need to become curious about what life is like for them and find additional ways to partner with them using the services I provide.

So, there you have a nice little reframing exercise.

Step 1. Don’t focus on the outcome

Step 2. Focus on the quality of your inputs by finding the good in your story.

Spend some time with this little exercise. If you are feeling anxious about something, write it down. Then find the inputs and turn them from negative toward the good. See if this helps you become less anxious about your situation.

I love feedback, so if you try this I would love to hear your story.

Give Me 4 More Weeks and I will Improve Your Stress Resilience

Last week I began a series describing the habits I have noticed throughout the years of stress-resilient people.

You know the types - it seems like their world is caving in around them, yet they have an ability to remain cool under pressure.

To recap, the first step in improving your stress resilience is:

Come to grips with the idea that bad stuff is just going to happen to you. You are not immune to adversity, and there is no vaccine. Reframe your attitude from “Why did this happen to me?” to “Why not me?” Adversity is as much a part of life as joy.

The second lesson I have learned about being more stress-resilient is to carefully choose where to focus your attention in times of adversity. When things come into our lives that don’t go the way we want them to, we are meant to learn something from them. But, we can get so wrapped up in the little details, or in the emotions surrounding the event, that we can miss the lesson.

Last week I wrote about losing one of my biggest clients, quite unexpectedly, and really through no fault of my own. I had been teaching for years in their company’s management development program. I would do some work with emerging leaders; helping them define their leadership principles as well as teaching other leaders the importance of self-awareness and emotional intelligence. I did this work for over 7 years and got great reviews every time we did a class. Then, I got a phone call that the company was reorganizing and they were not sure how they would be approaching training in the future.

So in one phone call, I lost one of my biggest and best clients. At least, I lost that opportunity with the client in a very ambiguous sort of way.

According to Pauline Boss, author of Ambiguous Loss, “People hunger for certainty.” We all like stability and to know, or at least to have the idea that we know, what is going to happen in the future. So, according to Boss, “…uncertainty makes ambiguous loss the most distressful of all losses…” This is because the loss is often very confusing. People can actually become immobilized by not being able to make sense of the situation. In my case, it was tough, because I always held a belief that if you did a great job for a customer, work would always follow. And while I think the basic tenant is true, there are just things that happen in business that are not in my control.

Second, the ambiguous loss felt very much to me like it was irrational. How could they no longer love me? How could such a great company no longer invest in leaders? As I thought about all of this, my mind became fixated on the loss. So much so I was starting to get physically exhausted. By focusing on the wrong part of the loss, I was losing my perspective.

My Intervention

I was telling this story to my coach during one of my monthly sessions with him. After our session, as I am prone to do, I sat and summarized the coaching in a journal I keep. Here is my entry:

-Don’t lose what you have to what you lost!

-What do I need to be learning through all of this?

At the same time this loss was happening to me, I was teaching a group of doctoral students at Indiana Wesleyan University.. I had been reviewing an article by Lila Davachi, Tobias Kiefer, David Rock, and Lisa Rock titled Learning that lasts through the AGES.

AGES is a 4 part acronym:

• Attention is critical.

• Generating insights takes time.

• Emotions govern.

• Spaced learning sticks.

Here is what I learned from each part of the AGES Model during my stressful time:

Attention is critical and I needed to focus on the customers I am still able to serve. Just because I lost this one thing should not affect how I serve those I am still blessed to work with.

Generating insights takes time. I have a tendency to want to rush things. If I am going to learn from this loss, I needed to give myself some space and realize that time does have a healing component to it.

Emotions govern and I get to choose how I feel. Sure, I was going to miss these great folks I had worked with and to some degree, I mourned the loss. And I am also joyful that I have other clients and in fact, I have been able to keep relationships with many folks at this company. So it turns out I really didn’t lose them, the work there just changed for me and looks very different.

Spaced learning sticks. I needed to process this learning over time and in chunks. You can not learn everything you need to learn all at once. Spacing things out, keeping them fresh in your journal, will really help you maximize your learning.

Summary Thought

For those of you wanting to improve your stress resilience, one of the most important points is to carefully choose what you will focus your attention on. You get to pick. You can focus on the pain and stay there. You can focus on how you were treated and dwell.

Or

You can appropriately accept and mourn your loss, and then focus on all the good things you still have.

Choose wisely.

That last thought actually will be the focus of next week’s post…Appreciate the good.

See you next week!

The Secret for Being Stress Resilient | Part 1: Getting A Grip

Spoiler Alert.

Over the next 5 weeks, I will be writing on the idea of becoming more Stress Resilient. I thought going deep on one particular topic might be kind fo fun, so let me know what you think about the series format! I hope you enjoy it, but if not, I’d love to know that as well.

So many of the clients I am working with these days are undergoing very fundamental changes in their business models. How they used to do things even two years ago are being drastically altered by changing customer demands or big shifts in market dynamics.

One of the things I have noticed when changes like this occur is the desire people have to go back to the way things “used to be.”

There is something innately comforting for us all in the known, even when the known is not our most desirable state.

Many years ago, I used to get on an airplane and fly across the country to teach a one day class in a management development program. I really loved the experience and developed many great relationships along the journey. The travel was hard. Exhausting even. But there was real comfort for me in getting on a plane on a Tuesday, flying all day. Then teaching all day on Wednesday. Spending the night in a hotel and flying home on Thursday. This work ended up taking 3 days for one day of actual work. And I loved it! No matter how hard it was, or how tired I got, I loved the work.

My wife would often say things like, “Why do you do that to yourself? Why don’t you find a client who is local so you don’t have to spend 2 days on an airplane for one day of work?”

Sometimes the truth really hurts.

Did I listen? Heck NO! I kept getting on the airplane. I loved this client. My wife could tell, so much so that from time to time she would suggest we move to California.

Then all of a sudden, it was all gone. The company reorganized how they were doing their training and the work I loved was no more.

All of that comfort was gone. All of those great relationships vanishing into thin air. All the fantastic people I was able to interact with and learn from…poof. No more.

All of this happened over the course of a single month.

Lesson 1

After I got off the phone with my client who explained to me that they were moving in a different direction with how they were going to train leaders my initial reaction was, “Oh no! Now what am I going to do?” I think this is pretty typical for us as humans during times of change or ambiguous types of loss to get self-referential and concerned for our own well being.

I can remember not knowing what to do exactly. I had an appointment with my coach the next day and planned to talk it through with him at that time. So, in the meantime, I did something that made me feel good, I went and worked out. I thought a good cardiovascular workout to the point of exhaustion was just what I needed to clear my head and think about what my options really were at the time.

I made it to the gym and got on the treadmill and my trainer Thomas said this to our group: “This is going to be a rough 23 minutes on the treadmills today. You are going to have increases in the incline of the treadmill every 2 minutes. I want you to start running at a push pace and maintain that pace as long as you can as you ascend.”

Then the gold came out of Thomas’s mouth, “This is not going to be easy, but as the climb continues I want you to envision: Your Future You!”

That is exactly what I needed to hear. I finished my workout and when I got home I went straight to my journal and wrote:

Adversity doesn’t discriminate. It happens to all of us as humans. It is really part of the human condition. I need to better understand that shit happens. I don’t want it to happen but it does.

Then I started to do something that I work with my coaching clients all the time - I reframed the adversity.

I started with “why not me?”

Look, I had a really good ride with that client. Almost 10 years and we really had a fantastic relationship. It was really awesome. Now they are doing things differently, and so I need to do things differently as a result.

WHY NOT ME?

This is exactly what needed to happen in order for me to start doing some things I had wanted to do all along.

The climb is not going to be easy (now my trainer Thomas is in my head), and I need to start to design my Future Me!

How about You?

Are things changing really quickly around you? I guess you can just sit there and take it and let the chips fall where they might, randomly without much of your input. You could bury your head in the sand and hope that the change that is happening doesn’t see you and just passes you buy.

Or, you can sit down and start to design your future you.

I wonder when you get to your future what your future you will say to your past you who decided to take the bull by the horns and create its destiny?

The other thing I would like to add is just a thought for all of you who are leading others through times of change and ambiguity.

And that is, in order to reduce stress, an important leadership challenge is to reduce follower uncertainty. Part of your job is to make the change as transparent as you possibly can. Even if you have to say you don’t know, be authentic and do your best. People still need a feeling of security, even when you don’t have the answers.

I believe that in a dynamic environment, leaders can reduce this uncertainty by continually communicating and reinforcing five key questions for the organization: who we are, what we are doing, why we are doing it, where we are going, and how we are going to get there. Answering these questions for followers can tap into some basic needs that influence human behavior.

If you don’t know what to say, then maybe just articulating some answers to these questions might be helpful.

Riding the Storm Out

I have been working on this post for about 3 weeks now. Sometimes posts and ideas come quickly to me, but this one has been very different. I have been trying to communicate an idea that is a bit difficult to wrap my head around.

How does our emotional intelligence impact our love for certainty in decision making?

AND THEN CAME DORIAN.

And the idea of how emotional intelligence relates to uncertainty in decision making became much more clear to me.

Consider this case

As a leader, you have recently taken an emotional intelligence self-assessment and your results show you have high Self-Regard. This means that you have a strong confidence in your strengths and a clear knowledge of your weaknesses. You are feeling good about that.

Then, as you continue to read your assessment, you see that you are less certain on how to really solve problems that arise that have a clear emotional component. The assessment you took calls this Problem-Solving.

The coach who is helping you understand the impact of your emotions on your leadership says one way to think about this high level of Self-Regard and weaker ability to solve emotional problems that arise is that you double down on certainty to solve the problem you are facing.

It is not that you avoid the problem. Quite the contrary. You don’t quite understand the emotion associated with the problem, so you lean on your confidence and intuition.

Fast forward a week or so and someone on your team has made a mistake. Not just any mistake, but one that is going to cost half of your department’s quarterly budget. The implications of this error are profound:

• The team off-site will have to be cancelled

• Two vendors who are helping you solve an IT issue that is already 3 months behind will have to stop working until next quarter

• You are hoping your boss isn’t going to hold bonus money from the team

• Not to mention, the impact of this on your team’s yearly performance reviews

Since you are a naturally competitive person who was born to win, rather than step back for a moment and consider the emotional impact this problem is having, your knee jerk reaction is to control the situation and double down on your certainty of how to act.

You lean into all your competitiveness and desire to control the situation. That swirling fear of the unknown causes you to begin to awfulize the event that has occurred, giving it far more weight than it deserves.

Your boss emails you and wants to meet with you the next morning to “understand” what happened. You quickly shift into problem-solving mode. Rather than call the team together and process the event in a quick after action review, you put together a 10 slide presentation that will show your boss exactly what happened and how to most certainly prevent this from ever happen again.

Except…

It Won’t.

This is because the imbalance between your Self-Regard and your Problem-Solving will continue to take you to certainty when emotional problems arise. Rather than examining the emotion associated with the problem so that you better understand what really happened, you overplay your strength.

You feel the meeting with your boss went well. You explained with great confidence what happened and what you planned to do about it.

Nonetheless, the impact of this gap in emotional intelligence is real.

What you will never know is that while you felt the meeting with your boss went well, she has a different perspective. She didn’t want a 10 slide action plan, she just wanted to better understand what happened. You went into fix it mode, she wanted to know the gist of the problem. Your need for certainty and being uncomfortable with ambiguity was a reason she doesn’t see you as strategic. She communicates this to her peers and HR in a personnel planning meeting. She is not supportive of promoting you until you improve your strategic agility. Your bosses feedback to you will be that the organization doesn’t really see you as being strategic.

Likely this is not what is happening at all….

What Does Dorian have to do with all of this?

Since my wife and I live in Orlando, this storm has real meaning for us. As I am writing these words we are preparing for lots of wind and rain.

As I watched the weather people tried to predict what is going to happen. I quickly realized no one actually knows. And yet, the weather folks on TV have to come on with a great deal of confidence, even if they are unsure of all the variables that will go into deciding where this storm will actually hit.

Realizing the emotion that accompanies a storm like this, and that you can not, even with all your self-confidence ,control the outcome, is in some way comforting.

It is not if problems are going to arise but when. The wisdom is in how you are going to respond.

I argue this wisdom has something to do with your emotional intelligence and the balance you have in your strengths and weakness.

See you all after Dorian. Please pray for Florida!!