Ed Batista

Huddle Up! (Building Group Cohesion)

I’ve spent countless hours working with small groups that aspire to become high-performing teams, in settings ranging from companies where I advised the CEO and their executives in their efforts to build a more effective organizational culture, to the Leadership Fellows program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which I helped launch in 2007 and supported for a decade. Here are some principles I've derived from that work to help teams foster excellence while also creating a sense of meaning and belonging:

1. Initial Conditions

We often think about how to make a good first impression in the context of a meaningful one-on-one relationship. [1] The less we know about the other person (and the less they know about us), the more important it is that the relationship gets off to a good start. In part this is because information vacuums make us anxious, so when we encounter one we immediately begin creating a narrative to explain the other person and make sense of their behavior. But this process is riddled with cognitive errors, most notably our tendency to trust our initial interpretation and our difficulty in imagining alternatives once we’ve settled on a story. [2]

But we may fail to bear this process in mind when convening a new group, particularly when some of the participants already know each other, and yet in group settings it’s even more significant. For those who lack pre-existing relationships, the knowledge that other group members know each other may be a source of relief—and it may be a source of heightened anxiety. And even when everyone knows each other, coming together as a group for the first time is a new experience for all of the relationships in the room, and the very newness of the group itself will influence the behavior of the individuals comprising it.

As a consequence it is critical to pay attention to the initial conditions that give rise to a new group, from the very first conversations about the idea to that moment when everyone finally comes together. (And note that when one or more new members join a small group, in some ways it's an entirely new group.)

• To what extent do people already know each other? Are there any outliers who are significantly less connected to the rest of the group?
• To what extent do people feel a sense of agency and control, and to what extent is their participation the fulfillment of an obligation?
• How might the initial conditions help to strengthen feelings of connection and control? How might these conditions diminish such feelings?

2. Safety, Trust, Intimacy

I view safety, trust, and intimacy as the essential foundations for successful group development. [3] Safety is a sense of confidence that we won’t get hurt or taken advantage of. Trust is a belief in the validity of others’ statements and actions; people mean what they say and say what they mean. And intimacy is the ability to make the private public; I can share what I’m thinking with you, and we can invite the rest of the group to observe or join in this conversation. When safety, trust and intimacy have been established people are then willing to experiment, take risks and make themselves vulnerable.

None of these steps need be grand or dramatic gestures—they’re often quite subtle. Experimentation involves an understanding of our habitual response to a given situation and the capacity to test alternatives. Risk-taking entails taking a step outside our comfort zones (which tend to expand when we do so.) And vulnerability can take many different forms; in some settings it’s vulnerable for someone to say, “I don’t know, what do you think?” When people are repeatedly engaging in these behaviors, the outcomes are greater learning, self-awareness, and behavioral change.

This can trigger a series of productive dynamics: Learning, awareness and change become self-reinforcing norms as people share their results more openly. We become more willing to experiment, take risks, and express more vulnerability. We value the importance of safety, trust and intimacy and act to enhance these qualities in the group. And we identify and seek to replicate initial conditions that support the development of these qualities in the future.

• How will the group's initial conditions support or inhibit the establishment of safety, trust and intimacy?
• At each step of the group's subsequent development, are we increasing or decreasing the levels of these qualities?
• What behaviors in the group dynamic support the development of these qualities?  And what behaviors inhibit these qualities?

3. Boundaries

Groups are defined by a number of boundaries, which can be tight or loose or anywhere in between. [4,5] For example, membership can be confined to a specific set of individuals, or people can float in or out. Meetings can be held at a specific date and time, or they can shift on the calendar. Meetings can start and end on time, or they can start late and run long. Attendance can be mandatory, or it can be optional.

At the beginning of a new group, we tend to want looser boundaries, because we prefer freedom and choice. But if the boundaries are too loose, then the group may never develop a meaningful identity and sense of commitment, and it will fail to take off. And if the boundaries are too tight, people may resist the pressure and push back, slowing or stalling the group’s development. So we have to take care to determine how tight to make the boundaries without creating too much resistance.

A version of this that comes up frequently in my practice is the composition of a company’s exec team, the senior leaders who meet regularly as a group with the CEO. If the group is too small, important perspectives will be left out, and if it’s too large, meetings will be chaotic and unproductive. One response is to loosen the boundaries by designating some meetings open to more junior execs, or by designating those execs informal members of the team, and yet these partial solutions create new problems in turn.

There’s no single optimal set of boundaries, but groups that fail to address the topic early on will find themselves stuck with the ones that emerge haphazardly from the initial stages of their formation, which may not truly meet their needs. The challenge is that unless we pay close attention to the group’s development, we may not even be aware of the boundaries that are being set until they pose a problem, at which point they can be difficult to change.

• What boundaries will best serve this group’s needs? What processes will we use to establish them?
• What boundaries need to be established early on (or even immediately)? Which ones can (or perhaps should) be decided later?
• How will the group know if the boundaries are supporting its goals? What processes exist to revise them when necessary?

4. Norms and Emotion

Every group has a set of norms--the unwritten rules that let us know what behaviors are acceptable in that particular setting. We rarely discuss these rules explicitly, but we can still sense them quite acutely and are keenly aware of any transgressions. Groups develop norms covering all aspects of our behavior, but norms regarding the regulation and expression of emotion are particularly important. [6] These norms are so significant because of the essential role that emotions play in communication and the tremendous potential they have to impact a group, both for better and for worse.

Emotions are attention magnets—they tell us that something significant is occurring in our environment or our inner life, automatically orienting us in that direction and drawing us in, and when we’re in the midst of an emotional experience it can be extremely difficult to focus on anything else. [7] In many group settings the norms regarding emotion are intended to work against these dynamics, treating all feelings as unhelpful distractions and seeking to minimize their outward expression.

There is utility in this approach—the mere experience of being in a group is often sufficient to generate an emotional response, and the ability to regulate our emotions allows us to co-exist and work together with a minimum of counterproductive conflict. Groups need norms that help us accomplish this task.

The problem with this one-sided approach is that it fails to acknowledge the necessary and useful roles that emotions can play in a group experience. Emotions are critical inputs in our decision-making processes, build stronger interpersonal connections, forge a sense of group identity, and motivate us to care about the needs of the group in addition to our personal goals. And both positive and negative emotions are equally important. Groups whose norms only allow for the expression of positive emotions ultimately become stifling, unfulfilling environments.

• What norms regarding the regulation and expression of emotions are the individual members bringing to this group?
• How are those norms serving the group’s needs at present? How are they getting in the way?
• What processes exist to explicitly identify these norms and make necessary changes?

(Here's a Group Norms Worksheet adapted from the work of Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven B. Wolff, cited below, that can be useful in this process.)

 

---

Footnotes

[1] First Impressions

[2] Seeing What's Not There (The Importance of Missing Data)

[3] Safety, Trust, Intimacy

[4] One Stone at a Time (Building Boundaries)

[5] Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance

[6] Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups (Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven B. Wolff, Harvard Business Review, 2001)

[7] Attention Surplus Disorder (Anxiety and Distraction)

For Further Reading

Symptoms of Group Strength

Agile Coaching and Group Dynamics

Team Effectiveness

Updated March 2019.

Photo by Greg Walters.

Learning to Yield (Navigating Tough Conversations)

One of my clients is a co-CEO, and in a coaching session I remarked upon the strength of that partnership and how effectively the two of them collaborated in what is often seen as an unworkable arrangement. "We learned to yield," she said, and I was struck by what a valuable interpersonal skill that is--and how little training we get in it.

We associate the term "yield" with driving, of course. When we yield on the road we slow down to assess the situation and determine who should have the right of way. We don't automatically come to a full stop, nor do we hit the gas. We might decide that another driver should proceed ahead of us, or we might decide that we should go first. The ability to yield allows for more efficient movement while also insuring safety.

So what does it mean to yield in our relationships? My client was careful to distinguish "yielding" from "capitulating," and I want to emphasize that distinction: I'm not talking about simply letting others get their way, or avoiding conflicts, or being nice. Instead, I see yielding as finding the right balance between deference and assertiveness, between inquiry and advocacy. So what does this look like in practice?

See the Signs

When we’re surprised by an impending collision, it’s difficult to yield gracefully--we either hit the gas aggressively to escape the threat, or we panic and jam on the brakes. This is often the result of a failure to be sufficiently attentive. Yield signs are posted at dangerous intersections to catch our attention and change our behavior. They aren’t as obvious interpersonally, but we can learn to recognize the situations, topics, and relationships that are hard to navigate safely and that require a more mindful approach.

For example, many of my clients have a talented but challenging employee--typically someone who’s highly intelligent with deep expertise in their field, but poor interpersonal and leadership skills. My client can't afford to fire this person at the moment (although they might if they could), and every conversation with them is an accident waiting to happen, particularly when there's a need to discuss their counterproductive behavior. It's essential to go into these conversations feeling well-rested and without being rushed--it may also be useful to choose the setting to either heighten the leader's authority or, alternatively, to create a greater sense of connection. [1] In some cases it's advisable to go for a walk--this allows for privacy and physical proximity, which can enhance feelings of closeness, while lowering the amount of eye contact, which can trigger an emotional response.

In the personal domain I’ve talked with many coaching clients and MBA students about the challenges posed by conversations with their spouses or significant others at the very end of the day. [2] This is fine for everyday topics, but it’s often problematic when there’s a need to discuss a sensitive subject likely to trigger strong feelings. Both parties are tired from a long workday, and they may have had a few drinks over dinner, so their capacity for emotion regulation is at its lowest. There may be no alternative time available to talk, particularly if they’re parents of young children, but even then it’s possible to be more mindful of the risks and to proceed with caution. (Which may mean avoiding drinking—it doesn’t mix with difficult conversations any better than it does with driving.) And sometimes they realize that the topic is so fraught that they need to plan ahead and make time earlier in the day or on the weekend to address it effectively.

Tap the Brakes

When we’re driving attentively and spot a yield sign, we instinctively hover over the brakes, prepared to slow our progress at the first sign of trouble. And having entered into a potentially difficult conversation with some thoughtfulness and care, we need to be able to do the same thing interpersonally. Again, note that yielding skillfully doesn’t mean coming to a full stop or simply giving way to the other person—tapping the brakes is a much more subtle process.

We need to bear in mind that our sense of timing isn’t always accurate—as I’ve noted before, "the reflexive responses we feel under stress—for example, in a crisis, or when engaging in conflict--can be counterproductive, making it more difficult for us to achieve our goals. We react quickly and impulsively, when we would be better served by slowing down and choosing a more thoughtful response." [3]

At the very outset of the conversation we can accomplish this simply by deferring the formal agenda and engaging in a few minutes of small talk. [4] In some settings this is a necessity; getting right to business would be considered hasty and rude. But even in more direct cultures, some initial conversation about essentially meaningless matters can be a valuable way to slow down and create a stronger personal connection in the process.

Once we’re engaged in the discussion, we need to remain attuned to our speed, in a very literal sense: Our thought processes, our speech patterns, and our heart and respiration rates all tend to speed up under stress, and they can serve as useful indicators of whether our overall pace is well-suited to the situation. This degree of awareness requires the ability to self-monitor [5] and to manage our attention [6], skills that can be enhanced by practices such as meditation [7]--and which are significantly impaired when we’re not well-rested. We can then use this data to consciously decrease our speed—taking deeper breaths, speaking more deliberately, and compelling ourselves to reflect further before reaching conclusions are all ways to tap the brakes in the midst of a conversation.

Note that while I emphasize the value of yielding here, there are occasions when we do need to come to a full stop in order to address an underlying communication problem that’s blocking progress. [8] For example, if someone’s constantly interrupting others and preventing them from completing their thoughts, it’s important to acknowledge this dynamic so it can be corrected. This requires both a set of norms that make it acceptable to “talk about how we’re talking” and as well as some skill at delivering feedback, but under these conditions this need not derail the conversation.

Hit the Gas…Lightly

An accelerator isn’t an on/off switch, and if we’re sufficiently sensitive and skilled, it has a wide range that allows us to subtly adjust our speed to suit the conditions. Once we’ve determined that we have the right of way, we begin accelerating gently, checking to be sure that other drivers have reached the same conclusion. It’s not a race, and we’re not trying to beat the other drivers—the goal is insuring that we all continue our forward progress safely and efficiently. The same is true in many difficult conversations.

After we’ve recognized the potential for conflict, and slowed down enough to engage the other party, we need to look for opportunities to achieve our goals for the conversation. We can struggle with this in a number of ways. I’ve had clients and students who, for various reasons, were uncomfortable asserting themselves and feared that if they did they’d automatically be viewed as overly aggressive—they were hesitant to accelerate at all. I’ve also worked with many people at the opposite end of the spectrum—they were insufficiently restrained, and when they decided to press ahead they floored it. It’s critical to be aware of our tendencies here—if we’re too cautious, we need to increase our comfort with discomfort [9], and if we’re too heedless, we need to learn to calibrate our assertiveness. [10]

Pressing ahead, firmly but sensitively, is ultimately an exercise in influence, and becoming comfortable with the need to assert ourselves is just the starting point. From there we have to make our case in a way that’s likely to be accepted by the other party. It’s helpful to be aware of concepts from social psychology regarding openness to influence, such as Robert Cialdini’s fundamental principles of persuasion [11] and Howard Gardner’s levers of influence. [12] Note that I’m not suggesting that we misrepresent ourselves or manipulate the other party to win their approval. But simply being mindful of people’s psychological tendencies and incorporating that awareness into our approach need not result in unethical behavior.

Because most of my clients are CEOs, a factor that they need to take into account is the added emphasis that their role can give to even casually expressed preferences. [13] Even when we’re seeking to actively persuade the other party, we don’t want to overdo it, and we need to be mindful of the impact of our positional power on the exchange.

 

---

Footnotes

[1] Setting the Table (Difficult Conversations)

[2] How Not to Fight with Your Spouse When You Get Home

[3] The Importance of Slowing Down

[4] Five Levels of Communication

[5] Self-Monitoring

[6] What Are You Paying Attention To?

[7] Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)

[8] The Toyota Production System for Relationships

[9] Comfort with Discomfort

[10] Underdoing It and Overdoing It (Assertiveness Over Time)

[11] Harnessing the Science of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini, Harvard Business Review, 2001)

[12] Howard Gardner on Influence

[13] The Blue Problem (Communication and Power)

Updated January 2022.

Photo by Tim Lenz.

Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)

I'm an executive coach, not a meditation teacher, but I regularly discuss mindfulness with my clients, all of whom are busy professionals in demanding leadership positions. This aspect of my practice has evolved over the past decade as a combination of research, my clients' experiences, and my own life have highlighted the role that mindfulness can play in our overall well-being and our professional effectiveness. While I don't advise clients on specific mindfulness programs, here are a set of concepts that guide my approach:

1. Overview

Mindfulness need not be viewed as an esoteric or mystical subject, although it's often perceived that way. It's merely the process of noticing what's happening around us, observing where our attention is going as a result, and sensing our cognitive, emotional and physical responses. A heightened sense of mindfulness allows us to direct our attention toward an intended object of focus and away from undesirable distractions, which can have a significant impact on our professional effectiveness. We can cultivate this ability through a number of practices, most notably meditation. A key is viewing meditation as a workout in attention management rather than as a break from the stress of daily life. It can be challenging, but like any workout, the difficulty is the point of the process. Consistent practice is essential, but meditating for just a few minutes a day can be sufficient.

---

2. Getting started

One way to begin is to block off just a few minutes--no more than 5--at a regular time of day when you won't be interrupted, set a timer, sit or lie comfortably, close your eyes, and focus on what it feels like to breathe. You will almost immediately be distracted by a thought, feeling or sensation--this is expected and part of the process. Notice what's distracting you, acknowledge any response you're having as a result, and return your attention to your breathing. This will happen repeatedly and probably throughout the entire experience, which will make it mildly stressful and somewhat unpleasant. Again, this is expected and part of the process. When the timer goes off, you won't feel anything other than a sense of relief that it's over and a concern that mindfulness is a waste of time. You'll be reluctant to repeat the process because you're a busy person, and this is the critical moment: You can allow those feelings to dissuade you from trying again, or you can try again despite your resistance. If you persist and make this practice a regular habit, your feelings about the process will not change much, nor will you observe any obvious results, for weeks or even months. But slowly, eventually, it will get easier, and you will likely notice subtle shifts in your ability to manage your attention, maintain focus, and remain calm under stress.

I know I'm not making it sound very appealing, but I think it's essential to be blunt here. Too often mindfulness is portrayed as a sort of spa treatment, which gets people engaged but also leads them to give up when it turns out to be something quite different. The remainder of this essay explores the concepts referenced above in greater depth, but you need not read any further to get started.

---

3. "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

While Voltaire certainly wasn't considering a meditation practice when he penned this line, it's highly applicable. [1] Mindfulness practices--and meditation in particular--can seem like the domain of experts, inaccessible to people lacking specialized training. Many clients and students I talk with are interested in the concept, but also feel daunted at the prospect of getting involved with something that seems to require major investments of time and effort, or even a radical change in lifestyle.

In part this stems from our association of mindfulness with figures at a distance from contemporary professional life--master monks and spiritual seekers. While we may admire their dedication and commitment, we may also mistakenly conclude that mindfulness is for people have little interest in following an ordinary career path. My own perspective on this changed when I heard Bill George talk in 2009, and he noted that he and his wife had meditated daily for the past 30 years. [2] Bill was the CEO of a public company for over a decade and has taught at Harvard Business School since 2004, and he comes across as a grounded, straightforward person who's squarely in the mainstream of corporate life. I've met many others like him over the past decade who view mindfulness as not merely compatible with their identity as professionals, but as a contributor to improved performance.

Even after we've begun exploring mindfulness practices, Voltaire's warning remains relevant because of the all-too-common feeling that we're somehow inadequate and not up to the task. We may begin meditating and find it impossible to "clear our mind," leading us to conclude that we're just not "good" at it. But the idea that "clearing the mind" is an achievable goal is rooted in a misunderstanding. Unbidden thoughts and feelings will constantly distract us when meditating, and the task of noticing these distractions and returning our focus to its intended object is the whole point of the process. The distraction doesn't make us a "bad meditator"--it makes us a human being.

---

4. Mindfulness and attention management

The definition of mindfulness that I find most helpful is nonjudgmental awareness and acceptance of experience. There are many different purposes this awareness can serve, but the function that's been most relevant to my clients and students over the past decade is attention management. [3] As a coach I've come to view attention as our most precious resource--one quite distinct from time, which we often use as a proxy for our attention because it's easier to measure. [4] But we often have little awareness of where our attention is going or find it difficult to maintain our desired focus.

We can overcome these challenges through conscious effort, for a time, but that's fatiguing and impossible to sustain indefinitely. What’s needed is a heightened ability to sense where our attention is being directed and to assess whether that focus is aligned with our intentions, both in the moment and over time. [5] Here mindfulness practices can play a uniquely helpful role. The definition I cite above refers not only (or even primarily) to our external experience--the world around us--but also to our inner experience--our thoughts, emotions and other responses to our environment. And a greater capacity for mindfulness not only allows us to take in more information about the world around us, but also to more fully sense and understand how we’re interpreting this data and where our attention is being directed as a result.

---

5. Mindfulness and Systems 1 and 2

In 2000 psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West coined the terms "System 1" and "System 2" to describe distinct reasoning processes in the brain [6], a model later popularized by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. [7] System 1 is automatic, unconscious, and fast, while System 2 is controlled, conscious, and relatively slow. It's inaccurate to characterize System 1 as "emotion" and System 2 as "logic," because emotion plays a role in both processes, but the former generates a host of "impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings," in Kahneman’s phrase. Some of these System 1 responses prompt immediate action, while others are assessed more deliberately by System 2.

An advantage of this arrangement is that System 1 can take in a tremendous amount of data from our environment and generate numerous responses simultaneously, which allows us to take action quickly and efficiently, with a minimum of conscious thought—in effect bypassing System 2. But in some circumstances, particularly when we’re under stress, we’re better served by slowing down our automatic System 1 response and engaging System 2 to assess the situation more thoughtfully and choose our response more deliberately. A challenge is that System 2 lacks System 1's parallel processing capacity and must work sequentially, focusing on one issue or problem at a time, which can create a bottleneck when we’re operating in a fast-paced environment. In addition, both Systems 1 and 2 are subject to a number of cognitive biases, systemic errors in how we think that lead us astray even when we believe we’re being careful and deliberate.

A greater sense of mindfulness helps us manage these difficulties in a number of ways: we’re better able to acknowledge our System 1 responses without immediately putting them into action, we can slow down [8] and engage System 2 more readily, and we’re more aware of the cognitive biases that distort our thinking in both modes.

---

6. The importance of feelings

One of the most significant benefits of mindfulness practice is heightening our awareness of feelings—not only emotions, but also physical sensations. The two are directly connected—emotions manifest themselves as physiological events before they register in consciousness. As noted above, such heightened awareness can at times allow us to bring our deliberative System 2 to bear on an automatic System 1 response, but the goal isn’t to try to bring our emotions under conscious control, which would be neither possible nor desirable. A critically important role that emotions play is to act as "attention magnets"—to interrupt conscious thought and orient us toward something in our environment that is likely to be significant. The ability to control our emotions would undermine this function and actually jeopardize our survival, given the slowness and inefficiency of conscious reasoning. Nor would we want to heighten our awareness of physical sensations too far--beyond a certain point such sensitivity can be uncomfortably distracting and even painful.

But many of us often operate at the other end of the spectrum—we're out of touch with our emotions and poorly attuned to our bodies, and so we have difficulty interpreting our feelings, or they build in strength and then catch us by surprise. [9] Mindfulness practices create an environment in which there are fewer external distractions and it’s easier to sense our inner feelings. We can pay close attention to our breathing, feel our heart beat, and be more aware of visceral responses or muscle tension—and we can more clearly grasp the emotions that accompany these sensations. We begin to make associations among these various feelings and the thoughts and ideas that may have triggered them. I think of this as "lowering the waterline"--increasing our ability to notice and observe mental and physical processes that ordinarily occur on the margins of consciousness.

---

7. Meditation: the most powerful mindfulness practice

There are other ways to pursue mindfulness—see below—but meditation deserves special mention. We often think of meditation as a complex process shrouded in mystery. In part this derives from the historic connection between meditation and spirituality—most religious traditions possess a set of practices that either involve meditation or evoke a meditative state through prayer or ritual. And yet while some people find it beneficial to integrate meditation more fully into their spiritual life, the two are not inextricably linked. When we examine meditation in isolation from any spiritual context, it emerges as the straightforward process of simply noticing where our attention goes and observing our response. This is a reductive description, to be sure, and there are many different views on the practice, but demystifying it in this way can make it more approachable for those who haven’t tried it before and help to clarify the potential benefits for professional effectiveness.

From this perspective meditation is a concentrated form of attention management with minimal distractions other than our endless stream of thoughts, emotions and sensations. While the absence of a concrete task to accomplish may seem disorienting, the process is directly related to the challenge we face when we are trying to complete a cognitively demanding task or work in a stressful or overly stimulating environment: Tune out unhelpful distractions and direct our attention toward an intended object. This is precisely what we’re doing when we meditate. And while we may question the ability of merely noticing where our attention is going to have an impact on our experience, a substantial body of research has emerged showing meditation’s positive effects on mood [10], anxiety [11], sleep [12], happiness [13], and even pain. [14]

---

8. But there are other paths as well

Meditation isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t the only way to pursue mindfulness. If you do find meditation particularly challenging, I consider point #9 before abandoning it—as with any workout, the difficulty of the process is the point of pursuing it. That said, while other mindfulness practices might not serve as a direct substitute for meditation, we can certainly pursue greater self-awareness (or augment a meditation practice) through a number of means:

• Exercise: Certain types of physical activity lend themselves well to a mindful state, in which we’re better able to reflect on our experience, sense our unbidden thoughts and emotions, and attune to our bodies. Any activity involving repetitive motion in an environment that supports sustained focus has the potential to serve this purpose. Note that the need to consciously navigate the outside world—on a busy road, or in a noisy gym—will diminish this impact. [15]
• Time in nature: While walking itself can be a form of mindfulness practice, there’s a particular benefit to being outdoors in a natural setting. Again, it’s important to minimize external distractions, but even if we live in an urban environment (as more than 80 percent of the people in the United States do) we can still take advantage of this process. Recent research suggests that as little as one hour a week in nature has a positive effect on our mood and ability to focus. [16]
• Journaling: Writing about our experiences can serve several purposes related to mindfulness. It allows us to see our thoughts and emotions from a new, more structured perspective. It helps to reinforce memories, enabling us to access them more readily in the future (even if we never return to the written document). And if we allow ourselves to write in a more spontaneous, automatic way we tend to discover unexpected ideas and associations that couldn’t have been accessed via conscious effort. Note that we often find the idea of journaling unappealing because what comes to mind is a sort of daily diary--“This happened, and then that happened…”—which most people find uninspiring and unsustainable. What I’m recommending here instead is any form of consistent practice that we do find both inspiring and sustainable. This can be as simple as jotting down three bullet points at the end of the day. [17]

---

9. It's a workout, not a break

Another challenge with mindfulness is the way that it’s portrayed in popular culture. It’s typically associated with rest and relaxation—a break from the stress of daily life. [18] This poses a dilemma, especially for beginners, because mindfulness practices—meditation in particular—can be stressful. The approach to meditation that I’m discussing here involves focusing our attention on a given object, such as our breathing, or even just a spot on the wall. Almost immediately after beginning to meditate we’re inevitably distracted by a thought, an emotion, or a physical sensation—and this will happen repeatedly in the course of every meditation session.

The task we face is to notice that we’ve been distracted, to let go of this new object that our attention has been drawn to, and to return our focus to its original object. And we’ll have to do this over and over and over again. This is repetitive, boring, and even stressful. And that’s the point, because meditation is a workout in the process of managing our attention. It’s not a break—it’s not a soothing shelter from distraction, but rather a stressful, head-on encounter with all of the spontaneous thoughts, feelings and impulses that distract us constantly.

---

10. Consistent practice > Long sessions

 A dynamic that’s common to the primary activities I recommend to clients and students—including exercise and sleep, in addition to mindfulness—is the importance of daily practice. These activities contribute more to our ability to do our best work and to our sense of fulfillment when they’re consistent habits. But even when we have the best of intentions, we often allow these important activities to get bumped off our calendars by more urgent ones, and we tell ourselves we’ll "make it up later," with a harder workout, more sleep, or a longer meditation session at some point in the future. [19]

This approach is problematic in two ways: First, it’s much easier to commit to a mindfulness practice when it’s truly habitual—when we’ve created a set of routines and triggers that generate an automatic response that makes it more likely that we’ll follow through on our intention. The more we have to stop and consider whether or not we’re going to meditate, the less likely we are to actually do it. The second problem is that inconsistent practice doesn’t appear to yield the same benefits as a daily routine, even if we meditate for longer periods of time. Current research suggests that there’s something important about a consistent practice—the closer to daily the better.

 

---

Footnotes

[1] Voltaire and Patton on Perfection

[2] Bill George on Leadership at the Stanford Faculty Club

[3] The Art of Self-Coaching, Class 3: ATTENTION

[4] To Stay Focused, Manage Your Emotions

[5] Growth, Profitability and Return on Attention

[6] Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? (Keith Stanovich and Richard West, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2000)

[7] Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman, 2011)

[8] The Importance of Slowing Down

[9] Underdoing It and Overdoing It (Assertiveness Over Time)

[10] Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis (Madhav Goyal, Sonal Singh, Erica Sibinga, et al, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2014)

[11] Randomized Controlled Trial of Mindfulness Meditation for Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Effects on Anxiety and Stress Reactivity (Elizabeth A. Hoge, Eric Bui, Luana Marques, Christina A. Metcalf, Laura K. Morris, Donald J. Robinaugh, John J. Worthington, Mark H. Pollack, and Naomi M. Simon, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 2014)

[12] Mindfulness Meditation and Improvement in Sleep Quality and Daytime Impairment Among Older Adults With Sleep Disturbances (David S. Black, Gillian A. O’Reilly, Richard Olmstead, et al, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015)

[13] Meditation and happiness: Mindfulness and self-compassion may mediate the meditation–happiness relationship (Daniel Campos, Ausiàs Cebollaah, Soledad Quero, Juana Bretón-López, Cristina Botella, Joaquim Soler, Javier García-Campayo, Marcelo Demarzo, Rosa María Baños, Personality and Individual Differences, 2016)

[14] Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Pain, Bypasses Opioid Receptors (Wen Chen, NCCIH Research Blog, 2016)

[15] Get Moving! (Exercise for Busy People)

[16] This Is Your Brain on Nature (Florence Williams, National Geographic, 2016)

[17] The Value of Journal Writing

[18] Meditation is a WORKOUT, not a BREAK

[19] Importance vs. Urgency

---

For Further Reading

The Emotional Life of Your Brain (Richard Davidson. 2012)

Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation (Daniel Siegel, 2010)

Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being (Linda Graham, 2013)

Developing Mindful Leaders for the C-Suite (Bill George, Harvard Business Review, 2014)

Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness (Jon Kabat-Zinn, 2007)

Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief (Jon Kabat-Zinn, 2010)

Full Catastrophe Living (Jon Kabat-Zinn, 2013)

Self-Directed Neuroplasticity: A 21st Century View of Meditation (Rick Hanson, Coaching Supervision Academy)

White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts (Daniel Wegner, 1989)

• Daniel Wegner's work on mental control and thought suppression

A Simple Way to Stay Grounded in Stressful Moments (Leah Weiss, Harvard Business Review, 2016)

The How of Happiness (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2008)

Mind Sculpture: Unlocking Your Brain's Untapped Potential (Ian Robertson, 2000)

The Compassionate Brain (Gerald Hüther, 2006)

Meditation Techniques for People Who Hate Meditation (Stephanie Vozza, Fast Company, 2014)

26 Scientifically Proven Superhuman Benefits of Meditation (Jon Brooks, ComfortPit, 2014)

This is what eight weeks of mindfulness training does to your brain (Christian Jarrett, BPS Research Digest, 2016)

Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman, 2011)

The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age (Richard Louv, 2012)

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healther, and More Creative (Florence Williams, 2018)

---

Mindfulness Tools

Tools I Use

• Don't Break The Chain
• Productive
• Calm

Other Tools I Recommend (But Don't Use)

• Headspace
• Buddhify

---

This is a companion piece to Get Moving! (Exercise for Busy People). Revised March 2019.

We've all heard variations on this post's title, but it's often mistakenly attributed to Dwight Eisenhower or Lewis Carroll. Actor, director and producer Martin Gabel deserves the credit.

Photo by Strevo.

Upping My Game: The Finish Line

Last month I embarked on a 30-day challenge to myself that involved four daily goals:

• Meditate for 30 minutes
• Publish one post
• Read, read, read, read, read
• Lift weights again

The overarching purpose, as I wrote at the time, was to up my game:

I don't mean "do more"--I've learned the hard way how important it is to preserve space in my mind and on my calendar for the things that really matter, and I have no intention of cluttering up either with frenetic activity. And I don't really mean "be better"--I have room for improvement in every domain in life and I'm very much at peace with who I am.

Upping my game means being a fuller, truer version of myself. Not chasing after "more" or "better," but, rather, allowing things to happen that might not otherwise. Although that doesn't mean sitting around on my ass waiting for the universe to make those things happen--I have an active role to play in this process.

Yesterday was Day 30. How'd it go?

Meditation

This was the biggest surprise and will likely result in the most significant change. I've been a believer in the value of meditation for years, although I've gone through periods of inconsistency, and even when I was most deeply committed a typical session for me lasted about 15 minutes. I knew I could keep a streak going for 30 days--I've done far longer ones in the past--but I didn't know what to expect from a 30-minute session. It turned out to be much easier than I would have thought--and just difficult enough. I can't say that I consciously experienced anything dramatically different--I felt a little more relaxed, a little more deeply immersed in the experience, but it generally felt like an ordinary meditation session. And yet there were some interesting side effects. It appears to have had an impact on my resting heart rate--here's the data from December:

It's inched back up to 63 over the last week, but that's still lower than where I started. And I'm well aware that correlation isn't causation, so I'm not leaping to any conclusions, but it's seems safe to say that meditating for 30 minutes hasn't hurt. Also, I feel a stronger commitment to the daily practice. This is probably in part a function of the 30-day challenge, but keeping the streak intact isn't that big a deal to me. The practice just feels like a more deeply integrated part of my daily routine, like my coffee in the morning. If I didn't meditate now, I'd miss it.

Writing

Last month I was blunt and to the point:

As a writer, my critical weakness is failing to finish. I have over 100 unfinished essays in various states of completion at this very moment. I dicked around with my book manuscript for a year, when I should have shipped the damn thing off to my editor. (Sorry, Tim.) So this month it's time to let that anxiety go, to finish, to get things done.

And here's what happened over the past 30 days:

1. Stop Trying to Be "Good Enough" by "Getting Better"
2. You're Not Multi-Tasking, You're Half-Assing
3. Pasta Shapes (Stupid Fights and How to Stop Them)
4. Get Moving! (Exercise for Busy People)
5. Seeing What's Not There (The Importance of Missing Data)
6. The Map Is Not the Territory
7. The Ideal Bar
8. Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?
9. What Is Winning?
10. The Danger of Playing It Safe
11. The Value of a Good Fight
12. The Spirit of the Stairway
13. The Life Cycle of Learning Design
14. Amy, California and Highway 1
15. Upping My Game: Halftime
16. Technology and Unhappiness
17. Three More Horsemen (How We Self-Sabotage)
18. Importance vs. Urgency
19. You Make Me Feel... (On Language and Responsibility)
20. Monuments to Our Inadequacy
21. This Year: A Look Back at My 2016
22. Gualala (On Mortality and Gratitude)
23. Open Space, Deep Work, and Self-Care
24. The Importance of Slowing Down
25. How to Fight a Fire (Self-Coaching in a Crisis)
26. How Leaders Create Safety (and Danger)
27. Acting As If
28. Three Paradoxes (Another Coaching Manifesto)
29. Touchy Feely Feedback from 2009
30. What Do Great Leaders Do?

Boom.

No magic, just a few simple changes: Go to bed early, wake up early, make a cup of coffee, and start writing immediately. Write in an offline Word document, not a browser, to minimize interruptions. Keep writing in the morning as long as possible before moving on to other activities. Don't waste early morning hours on other work. Don't try to do serious writing at other times of the day. Do this as often as possible.

I won't be able to maintain this pace in the future (nor is that a goal of mine), but doing it for 30 days straight was enlightening and empowering.

Reading

In 2015 I picked up the habit of reading fiction again--and in 2016 I promptly dropped it. I read constantly, but usually on nonfiction topics related to my work as a coach and teacher, and yet my experience two years ago helped me realize what an important role fiction has played in my life and how much I've missed it. I didn't set the world on fire as a fiction reader over the last 30 days, but I did read at least a chapter every day.

I finally finished a mediocre mystery that had been moldering on my bedside table and then plunged into Phineas Finn, Anthony Trollope's story of a young Irishman making his way up the social and political ladder in 1860s England. It was delightful. Not an earth-shattering experience, but every evening I looked forward to putting work aside, taking up my book, and seeing what would happen to these people I had come to take an interest in. And the experience of feeling connected to these characters, learning about their world, and in the process learning some things about myself and my world is precisely why I read fiction.

Current book: E.M. Forster's A Room with a View. I love the Merchant/Ivory movie more than words can say, but have never read the book. It's stunning, and (thankfully) leaves my lovely memories of the film intact.

Lifting weights

I specified weightlifting because I've been in the process of slowly recovering from a painful elbow injury that I suffered last Labor Day and which prevented me from lifting any weights at all for over three months. Exercise has always been important to me, and the more I learn about physiology the more value I see in weightlifting and other forms of resistance training, so my enforced inactivity last Fall was a frustrating experience.

But a lesson I took to heart was the importance of avoiding injury, and once I was able to get active again I was determined to be persistent but prudent, making sure that my eagerness didn't get the best of me. And the 30-day challenge turned out to be a great way to insure that I made steady progress without overdoing it. I wound up taking a few days off from lifting because my body needed the rest, but on those days I found a way to get some less strenuous exercise in, and a number of times I just went for a walk in Golden Gate Park.

---

A point worth noting: Throughout the past 30 days, I continued to prioritize sleep, averaging well over 7 hours a night. Optimal for me is about 7.5 hours, so I'm very happy with that result. I've learned the hard way over the years that good sleep hygiene is the foundation for everything else I hope to accomplish.

So having concluded my 30-day challenge, I feel like I'm beginning 2017 in good shape--mens sana in corpore sano--certainly in a much better state of mind and body than I was in a year ago. I have plenty of concerns about the year ahead, but I do feel that I've put myself in the best possible position to weather those storms and help out where I can. Let's get to work.

Photo by Daniel Mitchell. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

What Do Great Leaders Do?

When I hear the term "great leader," I’m reminded of two passages from management literature that have influenced my thinking about leadership and my approach to coaching leaders. First, from Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton’s Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense:

Leaders can and do make an important difference in organizational and group performance, although the effects are not as large as usually assumed nor as important as many other factors. It seems clear that leaders have some chance of making things somewhat better, but they can also make things much worse... This all suggests that avoiding bad leaders may be a crucial goal, perhaps more important than getting great leaders. [1]

First, do no harm is as important in organizational life as it is in medicine, and any discussion of great leadership should recognize the risks posed by bad leadership. The second passage is from Pfeffer’s Leadership BS:

Much of the oft-repeated conventional wisdom about leadership is based more on hope than reality, on wishes rather than data, on beliefs instead of science. The shibboleths of modern leadership loom large and influence how people navigate their careers, often to their detriment. And people’s uncritical acceptance of the feel-good stories told about leadership prevents them from apprehending reality and taking action to make things better. [2]

So I firmly believe that caution and skepticism are essential when exploring the question I pose above: What do great leaders do? And yet there’s a tremendous desire to understand potential answers to this question—I see it in my coaching practice every day, particularly with first-time leaders who are concerned that their lack of experience will cause them to make a misstep.

I’m not a social scientist--I’m an executive coach and a practitioner in the field. I can only answer this question on the basis of my empirical experience over the course of a decade of coaching leaders and teaching MBA students at Stanford. But in parallel with that work I’ve also sought to explore the findings of researchers like Pfeffer and Sutton and integrate all of this information into a philosophy that’s internally coherent while being open to new ideas.

So it was in this spirit that I addressed to a similar question posed in 2013 by Gemba Academy co-founder and former Kaizen Institute CEO Jon Miller: What is the definition of "great leader"? At the time I responded via tweet, and I was recently reminded of this exchange and decided to expand on those brief answers. [3]

So what do great leaders do?

1. Great leaders support others’ development as leaders, which may require allowing them to fail.

In 2009 I heard Bill George say, "We need to disavow ourselves of the notion that leadership is power over other people. Leadership capacity is the ability to empower other people to step up and lead," and this idea has deeply informed my approach to coaching over the last decade. [4] Our ability to scale up as a leader is contingent on our capacity to develop others, and my clients know they'll be more successful (and that their efforts will be more sustainable) if they're able to help employees grow into their full potential as leaders, rather than simply providing oversight and direction. But people ultimately learn to lead through active experience, not passive study, and this requires allowing them to make mistakes, to suffer setbacks, and even to fail outright. [5]

This can be daunting; failure has consequences, and it’s tempting to mitigate the risks by offering more explicit advice or even by taking over responsibility for the task. But this inevitably slows down the process of helping that person develop as a leader, and if we succumb to this temptation too often we ultimately undermine our own leadership effectiveness as well.

And yet if we ignore those consequences we’re telling ourselves a feel-good fairy tale of the type that Pfeffer rightly skewers above. There are times when leaders must prioritize the effective accomplishment of a task over the growth of an employee. There are people who are not going to progress much further beyond their current capabilities, and leaders shouldn’t invest extensive time and effort in their development. And there are moments when leadership requires the assertion of directive authority, and any aspiring leader who’s too uncomfortable with power to wield it effectively will find themselves at a disadvantage.

2. Great leaders accept their unique responsibility to embody the culture and walk their talk every day.

Leaders operate under a spotlight at all times. Every action they take is scrutinized and measured against their statements—and any gaps between the two are observed carefully (and often held against them.) This derives from the symbolic role leaders play—they’re not simply individuals fulfilling a set of responsibilities. For better and for worse, we view leaders as embodiments of our organizations and institutions, and as a result we expect them to act in alignment with the culture they claim to represent.

This can come as a surprise to first-time leaders. They know that leadership comes with symbolic duties at certain key moments—when addressing the entire organization, or at ceremonial events, for example. But they often fail to appreciate that a leader’s symbolic function is actually a constant 24/7 responsibility. Interactions that are mundane or even trivial from a leader’s perspective are laden with significance from the point of the view of other parties, and leaders need to bear in mind that their every utterance and gesture may be closely examined to determine its consistency with their stated values and aspirations. [6]

The constant scrutiny that comes with the symbolic aspect of leadership can be exhausting, and, at the same time, the deference that accompanies it can generate an inflated sense of self-importance. Ineffective leaders lose sight of the personal toll this process takes on them and fail to maintain relationships with people outside the scope of their authority—peers, friends, or even coaches like me. Leaders need the freedom to temporarily step outside of their symbolic role and simply be themselves as individuals in a way that’s rarely possible with employees or other stakeholders. [7]

I’m not suggesting that leaders should act disingenuously or that their embodiment of the culture is a charade. But one of the fairy-tales of contemporary leadership literature that Pfeffer is critiquing is the idea that leaders should “act authentically” in a way that privileges their personal sentiments and ignores their symbolic responsibilities. This is a crude and simplistic understanding of authenticity that fails to appreciate the disciplined effort, strategic forethought, and command of nuance that are necessary for truly authentic self-expression in a leadership position. [8]

3. Great leaders trust in themselves while also being committed to continued personal development.

As I’ve written before, if we don't ask ourselves, “How could I have done better?” we don't learn, and we don't grow. [9] And yet if we don't stop asking how we could have done better and simply accept our performance (and ourselves), we become paralyzed by our inability to let go and fail to move forward. This is an extraordinarily difficult balance to maintain, and I’ve seen often seen leaders over-emphasize one side or the other.

Bad leaders are simply too stubborn, egotistical, or defensive to engage in meaningful self-development. They’ve already learned what they need to know about themselves, and they aren’t interested in going any further. And they’ll succeed as long as the environmental conditions are favorable or their luck holds out, but they’ll be incapable of adapting to change or surviving a string of setbacks.

But leaders who take the opposite approach—who are ferociously committed to self-analysis and perpetually strive to better themselves—can fall short of greatness as well, albeit for different reasons. Sometimes their appetite for personal development is rooted in a lack of self-confidence that they’ve been able to overcome at earlier stages of their career, but which prevents them from taking necessary risks as the stakes get higher. And sometimes it springs from a lack of self-compassion, and their inability to care for themselves appropriately is unsustainable at senior levels of management where no one empathizes with the leader’s difficulties.

As with so much of human performance, the key is to cultivate both a growth mindset, which allows us to view our mistakes as learning opportunities, and to simultaneously develop a sense of trust in ourselves, to truly accept ourselves—with all our inevitable flaws and imperfections. [10] We have to be able to see those flaws and imperfections clearly to be able to address them when necessary—and we have to be able to ignore them, to set them aside and not allow them to distract us.

4. Great leaders know when to make their presence felt and when to get out of the way.

There are many different ways for leaders to fail here. Some leaders never get out of the way, either because of a lack of trust in their people, or because they feel they have to be present to add value, or because it inflates their ego to be involved, and they haven’t yet learned to manage this need. Most high performers prefer a degree of independence, and overly involved leaders can find themselves having difficulty recruiting and hanging onto their best people, which can lead to a vicious cycle of micro-management. As Pfeffer and Sutton say in Hard Facts, “Sometimes the best leadership is no leadership at all,” and as I learned many years ago from my fellow coach and Stanford colleague Collins Dobbs, “Some of the best interventions are the ones you don’t make.”

But leaders can easily err on the opposite side as well, in part because of the popularity of one of the feel-good stories of current management literature, the idea of the post-heroic leader. This model has been championed by Stanford’s David Bradford and Harvard’s Bill George, two management thinkers who’ve had a significant influence on my work and my approach to coaching, and I believe it has much to recommend it. Contemporary knowledge workers often have far better information at their disposal and know more about the task at hand than their managers, and the model of “leader as expert” simply no longer applies in many organizations, particularly in technical disciplines. And in theory a post-heroic leader should be able to adopt a number of alternative models better-suited to the situation: leader as coach, or leader as facilitator. [11]

But in practice I’ve seen a number of leaders take the post-heroic approach to a counterproductive extreme, and the result is a hesitant, indecisive and even fearful lack of leadership presence that leaves employees feeling uncertain and lost. This isn’t an accurate expression of the post-heroic model as conceived by Bradford, George, and others—it’s a caricature. And yet there’s something about the way that this model has been framed in the management literature and in business school programs like Stanford’s that seems to lend itself to this fundamental misunderstanding.

While leaving plenty of room for others, great leaders know when to assert their authority and act with power. This need not entail a full-blown return to heroic leadership, with the leader as all-knowing arbiter. But it does require a level of comfort with authoritative and directive behaviors, an ability to summon and employ a forceful interpersonal presence, and a high degree of emotional intelligence (because a little heroic leadership can go a long way.)

5. Great leaders add value by leading, not doing, and focus on motivating, challenging and supporting others.

This sounds almost silly--of course leaders lead. But do they really? Most people reach leadership positions by virtue of their competence as individual contributors, and it can be a challenge to step out of their comfort zones as high-performing doers and become actual leaders whose performance relies on the competence of others. Failing to make that transition results in the illusion of effectiveness, a trap for any leader, in which they’re working harder and harder while falling further behind. [12]

A few years ago I had a CEO client who realized that he and his management team were both operating at an unsustainable pace and were failing to make important structural improvements in the business because there were constantly reacting to crises. As he characterized the situation, they were stuck fighting fires, and they needed to transform themselves into fire marshals who could prevent the fires from starting in the first place.

But he also realized that his own management style was part of the problem—he was holding on to too many tactical responsibilities, which not only made him a bottleneck but also served as a bad example for his senior managers. He concluded that at this stage of the company’s development, any effort he was expending on technical tasks, both financial and technological, wasn’t just a waste of time—it was actually destroying value. He delegated these tasks to his team and coached them through the process of doing the same with their direct reports, ultimately freeing up a tremendous amount of capacity for strategic leadership that had previously been focused on tactical execution.

It was a powerful example of what Pfeffer and Sutton, in Hard Facts, describe as a systemic approach to leadership:

Leaders often have the most positive impact when they help build systems where the actions of a few powerful and magnificently skilled people matter least. Perhaps the best way to view leadership is as the task of architecting organizational systems, teams, and cultures—as establishing the conditions and preconditions for others to succeed. [13]

To quote Jon Miller's concise summary of my original tweets, "great leaders are secure, succeed through others, promote learning, and lead by example." I'd also suggest that they follow Pfeffer and Sutton's guidance to "maintain an attitude of wisdom and a healthy dose of modesty" and first, do no harm.

 

Thanks to Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton, two thinkers who've had a significant impact on my understanding of leadership and my approach to coaching and teaching.

---

Footnotes

[1] Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense, page 194 (Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, 2006)

[2] Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, pages vii-viii (Jeffrey Pfeffer, 2015)

[3] Five thoughts on great leadership...

[4] Bill George on Leadership at the Stanford Faculty Club

[5] Bill George on Teaching Leadership

[6] Watch That Next Step (CEO Problems)

[7] The Friendship of Wolves

[8] Leadership and Authenticity

[9] Living in the Tension (Self-Assessment and Self-Acceptance)

[10] Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives (Maria Popova, discussing the work of Carol Dweck, 2014)

[11] Leading in Four Dimensions

[12] The Illusion of Effectiveness (Doing vs. Leading)

[13] Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense, page 200 (Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, 2006)

 

Photo by Paulo Valdivieso.

Touchy Feely Feedback from 2009

In two days I'll begin teaching another section of Interpersonal Dynamics (aka Touchy Feely) at Stanford. I first encountered the class as a student at the Graduate School of Business in 1999, I started serving as a group facilitator in 2007, and I joined the faculty last year.

In 2008 I documented the feedback I received from my students at the conclusion of one of the groups that I facilitated that year--an experience that I described at the time as "a performance review conducted simultaneously by 13 people." I recently discovered a similar list of the feedback that I received from a group that I facilitated in Winter Quarter 2009, exactly eight years ago.

As I prepare to ask the 36 students in my section and the 6 facilitators on my staff to embark on this journey with me, it seems appropriate to walk the talk and share what I learned about the things I did well in that long-ago group and the things I needed to keep working on:

Things I've Done Well

• I express a wide range of feelings and emotions, at varying levels of intensity, in a very clear way.
• I'm good at focusing on my own experience without attributing
• I'm direct and straightforward.
• My intentions are usually well understood.
• I challenge people in useful and productive ways that promote learning.
• I care deeply for other people, and my support for their growth and development is evident.
• I create a sense of safety and trust.
• I express myself and interact with others authentically, which reinforces that trust.
• I effectively balance my role as a coach with a deep sense of personal investment.
• I model the behaviors I encourage others to experiment with; I express my feelings, step into conflicts, stand my ground, and admit mistakes.
• I'm open to feedback.
• I'm willing to work through difficult issues, and I stand by people when things get tough.
• I'm a strong steward with a gentle touch, allowing people to learn and grow through their struggles but offering support when it's needed.
• I take risks to push people beyond their comfort zones, particularly around the value of expressing feelings.
• I'm effective at making people feel heard and understood.
• I'm willing to learn and grow myself, which also helps to build trust.

Things I Need to Keep Working On

• I make assumptions about people and then act on those assumptions without first testing their validity.
• If I've asked a group to abide by certain processes, I need to be sure to follow those same rules myself.
• I find it easier to express my frustrations with men, while I'm more supportive and less confrontational with women
• I need to pay more attention to my own needs in relationships and put them forward more assertively, not only to insure that they're met, but also to help establish more equitable relationships in which my colleagues feel able to help and support me.
• I tend not to give critical feedback when I worry that it will reflect poorly on me in some way.
• I find it harder to share more of myself when I'm in a leadership role, and as a result groups don't get to know me as well.
• I do challenge people effectively--but I can push them harder and sooner than I think, and I can be more directive as a leader without undermining my effectiveness.
• I can do more to push people beyond their comfort zones in service of their learning; in particular, I should ask whether I'm pushing everyone in a group or only certain people.
• I can occasionally rely on stock phrases or jargon, which diminishes the impact of what I'm saying.
• I can share more of myself with a group--and sooner--to build stronger and closer relationships.

It's a striking experience to read this eight years later and see myself portrayed so accurately. Many of these strengths are qualities that I've tried to emphasize in my work as a coach and teacher, and in my life as a husband, son, and brother. And many of these shortcomings have been focal points of my effort to grow and change as a person over the last decade.

One item that jumps out at me, in part because I still have a vivid memory of the feedback being delivered, is the comment on the disparity in my relationships with men and women. I'd never noticed this pattern until it was pointed out by one of the students in her final feedback to me. She'd had a difficult experience in the class, and my support for her had been an important resource that had helped her get through it. Her gratitude was effusive, and I recall feeling a surge of pride as she expressed it to me. However, she continued, as she looked around the group she realized that she'd seen me challenge and even confront all of the men, and that they had benefited from my willingness to push them, and she'd only seen me offer support and comfort to the women, and she felt cheated. I felt surprised and embarrassed. I care deeply about sexism, and it's important to me to address the many forms of discrimination women face, and I thought I'd been a good ally to women over the years. It was disappointing to realize that I had such a major blind spot in this area.

This feedback led to a lot of self-reflection. I readily saw the roots of this dynamic in my family, my early community, and the culture at large. I'm the oldest of three brothers, and my formative experiences in the 1970s and '80s left me feeling comfortable challenging men and supporting women, and far less comfortable supporting men or challenging women. Even as I developed an interest in fighting sexism and discrimination, my own sexism led me to maintain one stance toward men and another toward woman.

It was clear that this was preventing me from being a better coach and teacher for women, because I was over-emphasizing a supportive relationship with them and hesitating to challenge them more assertively. But the unexpected insight was that this was also preventing me from being a better coach for men, because I was over-emphasizing a challenging relationship with them and hesitating to express support, comfort, and tenderness toward them. I was only showing up as half a person in all of my relationships, and in a way that was deeply sexist, with negative consequences for everyone.

I've tried to bear this in mind over the past decade, to consider the impact of gender in my relationships with students and clients, and to insure that I'm challenging women and supporting men and showing up as a full person, a complete person, with everyone. (I've even come to see supportive challenge as one of the core pillars of my approach to coaching.) I feel good about the progress I've made, but that's for others to judge. I can say that the whole experience contributed significantly to my belief in the importance of being open to feedback, learning from my mistakes, maintaining a growth mindset, and increasing my comfort with discomfort. Getting that feedback was one of the toughest moments in my career, and I am so grateful for it.

Photo by Mobilski.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Three Paradoxes (Another Coaching Manifesto)

I began coaching in 2005 and within a year I had I left my last leadership position to commit myself to a full-time coaching practice. I feel privileged to do this work—for me it’s a calling, not a job--and one of its rewards is the fact that there will always be more to learn. Twelve years (and thousands of hours) since I first started down this path, I’ve identified three paradoxes that are central to the experience of coaching and which I’m constantly trying to understand at a deeper level:

1. Supportive Challenge

A client once told me, "It feels like you're always in my corner, but you never hesitate to challenge me." It was some of the most gratifying feedback I ever got because it precisely describes my intended approach to the process.

My clients need to feel supported by me in a number of ways. They need to feel a sense of trust in my good intentions, my judgment, and my confidentiality. They need to feel sufficiently safe to be vulnerable--a process that begins the very first time we talk, because it can be a vulnerable experience for a leader who’s enjoyed great success in life to even express an interest in coaching. And they need to feel that I truly care about them as an individual.

My clients also need to know that my support will not prevent me from challenging them. They need to know that I’ll offer an alternative perspective and not simply ratify their feelings and agree with their point of view.  They need to know that I’ll be candid when I’m concerned or disagree with them or simply feel that something isn’t right. They need to know that I’ll speak up when I sense that they’re not being candid in return--that I’ll call them on their bullshit, just as my coach does for me. (She’s had a lot of practice.)

2. Intimate Distance

Meaningful coaching is always an emotionally intimate experience, no matter what’s being discussed. In part this is a function of the context: two people talking directly to each other with no distractions. We're not multi-tasking or sub-dividing our attention in any way. The person I'm coaching is completely focused on the issue at hand, and I'm completely focused on them. Such concentrated attention--a rare experience for most of us--inevitably creates a close personal connection.

Intimacy in a coaching relationship also results from a willingness to "make the private public"--to share with another person the thoughts and feelings that we usually keep to ourselves. Most of my clients are CEOs or in other senior leadership roles, and a dilemma they face is that they can’t always speak openly with their employees or investors, and yet their family and friends aren’t necessarily helpful discussion partners. A strong coaching relationship is one that creates an environment in which emotional intimacy is possible because both the client and I feel comfortable and willing to “make the private public” and express ourselves more fully.

And yet an essential factor that makes such intimacy possible is a clear set of boundaries defining the relationship, which create an inevitable and necessary sense of distance. Coaching conversations aren’t spontaneous events--my clients and I meet and talk for a predetermined length of time in a specific location. The relationships I have with my clients are warm and friendly ones, and yet it would be inaccurate to say that we're friends—they need me to be their coach, not their friend, and we do the relationship a disservice if we confuse the two. And while I'm deeply invested in my clients and not in the least indifferent, I’m not attached to any particular outcome for them, a stance that requires a degree of distance that’s not possible in most personal and professional relationships.

3. Confident Humility

This is how I view myself and my role in a coaching relationship. I have a strong sense of confidence in my ability as a coach, which is rooted not only in my professional experience, but also in my ongoing commitment to challenge myself and to continue to my development as a person. I've reached the point in this process where I feel some "comfort with discomfort"--it's not that I have confidence in every situation, but I can sense its absence at the limits of my comfort zone, and I'm generally able to find a way to make progress even under those circumstances. I’ve learned that courage isn't confidence.

At the same time, I feel a sense of humility as a coach. My clients are in the driver’s seat, and I’m merely helping them navigate. I don't withhold my opinion when I believe it's relevant, but ultimate I add more value by asking questions and reflecting my clients' own views back to them, not by virtue of my own expertise. And while I would never describe myself as a humble person, I’m humbled on a regular basis by an awareness of my limitations (which fuels the drive to challenge myself) and by embracing mortality, which I view as one of the primary tasks of adulthood.

---

There’s a delicate balance to maintain in each of these dimensions. It’s all too easy to err on one side or another: to over-emphasize support for a client and fail to challenge them, to embrace the emotional intimacy of a coaching relationship and neglect the necessary boundaries, to feel the flush of confidence and forget the humility that's essential to the role (and, in each case, vice versa). And the difficulty of this work is one reason why I have my own coach (and why I believe every coach should have a coach).

 

This is a companion piece to In Defense of Normal (A Coaching Manifesto).

Photo by Brett Jordan.

Acting As If

There's a concept in improvisational theater called act as if: Don't be constrained by the literal reality surrounding us; instead, challenge our immediate interpretation of what's happening and act as if what's being represented onstage is real. This ability to transcend our initial impression and look at the experience from a new perspective is critical in allowing improv scenes to move forward. Writer and improv coach Ben Kharakh has noted that, "acting as if whatever’s happening is actually happening...keeps you from being stuck." [1]

This logic can apply to real life as well. When we're stuck or frustrated or upset, sometimes our response to the issue at hand is more problematic than the issue itself. In a sense, we're the problem--or, to be more precise, our mindset or mental model is the problem. [2,3] At these times we have an opportunity to act as if. We can cling to our initial impression of what's happening and remain stuck or frustrated or upset--or we can challenge that view and act as if something else is going on.

There’s a difference between productive acting as if and unhelpful magical thinking, in which we shut our eyes, cross our fingers, and simply hope the problem goes away. Acting as if involves challenging our current perspective and beliefs, while magical thinking simply reinforces them.

To challenge our interpretation of a situation, we have to know what it is in the first place. We have to slow down, step outside our immediate experience, and get some critical distance on ourselves. [4] We can do this with a coaching partner--someone who’s able to ask open-ended questions, reflect back what they’re hearing, and resist the temptation to immediately offer advice. We can do this independently--journaling in some form is often helpful, because the process of writing down our thoughts helps to organize and clarify them. And with practice we can do this in the moment, recognizing that our reflexive interpretation may not be the most accurate or helpful.

Creating this space allows us to identify alternative perspectives, including others that might not readily come to mind. This can be profoundly difficult work because it requires us to resist some powerful mental processes. As I wrote recently, "Even when faced with massive gaps in information, we tend to focus on the information at our disposal and rely on it to construct a narrative, as flimsy as it might be [and…] we're typically overconfident in the validity and coherence of our explanatory narrative." [5]

This confidence in our point of view usually serves us well—we’re generally quite skillful at making sense of a situation on the basis of limited information and relying upon that narrative to guide our actions. The problem is that at critical moments—when we’re under stress--our sense-making skills are impaired and the narratives they generate are deeply flawed, and yet we remain as convinced as ever of their accuracy. The key is to suspend belief in our point of view, and act as if an alternative interpretation might be the real story. [6]

 

---

Footnotes

[1] Cited in January 2017 from http://benkharakh.com/coaching. This page is no longer available.

[2] The Meaning of Mindset

[3] Corn Mazes and Mental Models

[4] The Importance of Slowing Down

[5] Seeing What's Not There (The Importance of Missing Data)

[6] Suspension of Belief

Photo by Kendrick Martin.

How Leaders Create Safety (and Danger)

Some time ago John Lee posed a question that I think every leader should be able to answer:

I'm realizing how crucial psychological safety is in the process of change. What are some helpful tactics on creating safe zones? [1]

In my coaching practice I work with senior leaders who are often guiding their organizations through periods of rapid growth and sweeping change, so this is a topic that comes up regularly in conversations with clients. As I've noted before, change is hard, and safety is important, but how do leaders actually create the safety that's necessary to support change in their organizations? [2,3] A good place to start is by reviewing David Rock's SCARF model. [4] An acronym standing for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness, SCARF identifies the potential sources of "social threat"--interpersonal experiences to which we respond as if they posed a literal threat to our physical safety.

When we encounter one of these situations we undergo a "threat response," commonly known as a "fight, flight or freeze response," triggering a cascading series of physiological and psychological events. When we interpret a situation as threatening on some level, certain neurotransmitters are released (notably adrenaline and cortisol), and our heart rate and blood pressure increase, along with a host of other responses that vary across individuals, and we enter a distressed emotional state which we typically experience as anxiety, fear, or anger.

This heightened state of emotional and physiological arousal serves a useful purpose when we're truly facing a threat to our actual safety--we're primed to make fast decisions and to take rapid, forceful action. But for these same reasons it can result in counterproductive behavior in the face of a social threat. The problem is that when we're in the grip of a threat response we're cognitively impaired, and we don't process information as accurately. We may be primed to act quickly and forcefully, but we're also likely to misinterpret interpersonal cues, misjudge others' motives and intentions, and respond far too strongly than is useful.

This has important implications for the workplace, especially when people need to act quickly and collaboratively to overcome challenges. In this context one of a leader's most important tasks is to minimize the risk of social threat, and the SCARF model provides a useful way to understand how leaders can inadvertently trigger these threats and what we might do differently to establish the appropriate level of safety.

Note that creating maximum safety isn't the goal--modest and limited amounts of stress can be helpful. But a full-blown threat response inevitably hurts performance and undermines effectiveness, and once it's triggered it can take a great deal of time and energy to return to a calm, focused state of mind. It's far more efficient to avoid it in the first place.

So what can we do? Let's use Rock's SCARF model as a guide:

Status

When we encounter someone of higher status, we're more likely to experience a threat response, so leaders need to pay close attention to our deployment of status markers. This includes anything that conveys our differentiation, ranging from literal status symbols, such as a private office, to more ephemeral behaviors, such as interrupting someone, or sitting at the head of the table in a meeting. At times it can be useful or even necessary for leaders to heighten the status gap between ourselves and others, but in many instances it's important to do just the opposite and diminish that gap, particular if the goal is to increase others' sense of safety.

Certainty

When we're less certain about the outcome of a situation, we're more likely to experience a threat response. By definition periods of change in an organization are characterized by greater degrees of uncertainty, and new responsibilities, new roles, new relationships, even new office space can all diminish a sense of safety and heighten feelings of anxiety. Looming in the background is the possibility that jobs may be eliminated or that the organization itself may be at risk--the ultimate uncertainty. In these circumstances leaders need to be attuned to the information asymmetry that accompanies any differentiated role. We may not be certain about the future, but we very likely have more information at our disposal that allows us to feel less threatened or anxious. At the very least, we know much more about our own intentions than others do. While not all information can be shared with everyone, consider what can be shared, and how we might be more transparent about our plans.

Autonomy

When we feel less autonomous or free to choose, we're more likely to experience a threat response. Here, too, the asymmetry between a leader's level of autonomy and the freedom of action enjoyed by those around us is critical. Leaders are never simply free to act as we choose, of course, and every leader operates under a set of constraints. But what leaders often fail to appreciate is that our own behavior and differentiation can have a significant impact on the autonomy enjoyed by those around us. As Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky has noted, "the words of those with power loom large over those with less power." [5] While leaders at times need to act in opposition to the will of others, reliance on hierarchical power to compel compliance should always be a last resort. But the greater risk isn't that we abuse our explicit authority as leaders--it's that we inadvertently diminish others' autonomy (and thus their sense of safety) by failing to grasp the extent of our implicit influence. Leaders need to pay close attention to how we communicate, even (especially) when we think we're just expressing a preference. [6]

Relatedness

When we encounter someone we perceive as unrelated to us--i.e. not a member of our social group--we're more likely to experience a threat response. The unconscious process of assessing others and our sense of connection with them begins immediately--within 1/10 of a second [7]--and it's often affected by factors beyond our control, such as race [8] or even facial structure. [9] Another factor that's relevant in this context is a leader's differentiation--simply being in a hierarchical relationship can create a sense of social distance and disconnection. Because our feelings of relatedness with others are so strongly affected by factors that we can't control, it's important for leaders to build relationships and create connections with those around us through the factors  that we can control. From the very start of every working relationship, leaders need to look for ways to establish a sense that we are members of the same social group--in many national and organizational cultures, this is one of the primary purposes of small talk. But this work can't be deferred until we're facing a challenge, or it will rightly be perceived as expedient and insincere and have little or no impact--we have to pursue it consistently over time. And note that the point isn't to be "nice"--the purpose is to create a sense of shared identity so that during times of change and in other stressful circumstances people are less likely to experience a threat response.

Fairness

When we believe something is unfair or unjust, we're more likely to experience a threat response. The dilemma here is that a leader's actions will often be perceived by someone as unfair or unjust in some way--this is an unavoidable consequence of leadership, and at times there's simply no way to reconcile conflicting points of view. But in my experience people feel an even greater sense of injustice in the absence of an open dialogue; we may not feel that it's necessary to get our way, but we do feel that it's necessary to have our say. So when we feel that we've been given an opportunity to voice our opinion and to be heard, we're more willing to accept an outcome that's not aligned with our preferences. The key for leaders is to make enough time and space for sufficient dialogue and resist the impulse to maximize efficiency. A related dynamic here is that leaders often assume that the intentions behind our actions are obvious to others, when in fact they may be anything but; being clear and explicit about our intentions can help mitigate perceptions of unfairness and increase others' sense of safety.

In closing...

As with so many of the issues I discuss with clients, the concepts above are easy to grasp and difficult to put into practice. What makes all of this work even more difficult is that when we're in a leadership role we often lack perspective on our own behavior and its impact on others; we fail to sense the ways that we may inadvertently diminish others' sense of safety and trigger a threat response. The best way to combat this is to build a feedback-rich culture, to make feedback less stressful (for the recipients and the givers), and to explicitly welcome it ourselves.

 

---

Footnotes

[1] @jlkirbee

[2] Why Change Is Hard

[3] Safety, Trust, Intimacy

[4] Neuroscience, Leadership and David Rock's SCARF Model

[5] When You're in Charge, Your Whisper May Feel Like a Shout (Adam Galinsky, The New York Times, 2015)

[6] The Blue Problem (Communication and Power)

[7] How Many Seconds to a First Impression? (Eric Wargo, Association for Psychological Science Observer, 2006)

[8] The Science of Your Racist Brain (Chris Mooney and Indre Viskontas, Mother Jones, 2014)

[9] Our Brains Judge a Face's Trustworthiness--Even When We Can't See It (James Devitt, New York University, 2014)

 

For Further Reading

I highly recommend the work of Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who has heavily influenced my perspective on psychological safety in organizational life since I originally wrote this post. My comments above are consistent with Edmondson's ideas, but she explores the topic in much greater depth:

Make Your Employees Feel Psychologically Safe (Martha Lagace interviewing Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, 2018)

How Fearless Organizations Succeed (strategy+business, 2018; excerpted from Edmondson's book below)

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth (2018)

Building a psychologically safe workplace [11:26 video] (TEDxHGSE, 2014)

Managing the risk of learning: Psychological safety in work teams (2002)

 

Photo by Virginia State Parks.

How to Fight a Fire (Self-Coaching in a Crisis)

Most of my coaching clients are CEOs of rapidly growing companies, and most of the rest are senior leaders in similar settings, and while their work is always demanding and dynamic, sometimes they face a full-blown crisis, a threat to the organization’s existence that will require their maximum effort. These are the situations that truly test a leader’s ability to self-coach, to manage themselves effectively while also guiding others. Here are four factors that have helped clients who’ve had to surmount a crisis:

1. Self-Care

Taking care of yourself when you’re in the midst of a crisis is easily overlooked because there are so many more urgent tasks to address--and yet it’s at these moments that a modicum of self-care becomes even more important. I’m not suggesting that you can maintain your personal routines as if everything's normal--you will have to adapt to get through the crisis. But you also shouldn’t overreact and abandon your routines entirely. The important-but-not-urgent activities such as sleep and exercise that serve you well during normal times will continue to support you during a crisis, and they may even be more critical to your effectiveness. [1]

You may not be able to get a full night’s sleep, but you need to have a sense of you necessary baseline. After a certain point the extra hours of effort made possible by getting less sleep are outweighed by your sub-optimal performance--and you may reach that point surprisingly quickly. [2] You may not be able to stick with your fitness routines, but you can get out of the building and take a walk around the block every few hours. [3] And if you meditate, you may have to adjust you practice, but bear in mind that one of the primary purposes of meditation is helping you direct and manage you attention, which becomes more important than ever during a crisis. [4]

Another important aspect of self-care in a crisis is being mindful of what you eat. It’s tempting to simply consume whatever junk is on hand, and yet putting some effort into obtaining higher-quality food to sustain yourself and those around you will go a long way. (Some research suggests that a low-carb, high-fat diet may support improved physical and mental performance, although results are highly individualized. [5]) And if you drink, it’s even more important to pay attention to your consumption of alcohol in a crisis. It's all too easy to drink more than you should as a way of managing stress or getting to sleep, and yet this is often counterproductive--for example, sleep may come more readily, but it's likely to be lower-quality, causing increased fatigure.

2. Emotion Regulation and Disclosure

In a crisis you may be in close communication with colleagues while emotions are running high, and in a leadership role you’re also under a spotlight. [6] People are looking to you to set the tone, and this obligates you to carefully regulate what you say and how you say it. But leaders are as susceptible to strong emotions as any other individual, and there are limits on your ability to suppress feelings of anxiety or turmoil in order to serve as an example to others. There are also circumstances in which it’s helpful for a leader to disclose such feelings and share your vulnerability--if you always present a stoic exterior to the world, you'll miss opportunities to create closeness and connection, and you'll probably pay a personal cost in the process. [7]

It’s essential to find the right balance between regulation and disclosure--to know when, how, and with whom certain thoughts and feelings should be expressed. People who lack the ability to regulate themselves in a crisis don't tend to last in leadership roles--their fear or anger get the best of them, and they overwhelm their team and make sub-optimal decisions. But leaders who over-regulate in a crisis may also under-perform. The goal isn't to suppress these difficult feelings, but rather to regulate them and find the right way to disclose them in a given situation. [8]

Leaders do need to be able to simply vent and express themselves without worrying about self-regulation, and this is more important than ever during a crisis. Having access to people you trust who aren't personally invested in the success or failure of your organization is essential so that you can fully acknowledge the stress and anxiety you feel. Candid conversations with trusted allies make it easier to manage difficult emotions in more public settings. Note that this can pose a challenge when you only turn to family and friends in the midst of a crisis--they’re eminently trustworthy, but they may also be attached to a given outcome that makes it difficult for them to be objective listeners. [9]

3. Role-Playing

Crises inevitably involve holding difficult conversations when you're not well-prepared. Under ordinary circumstances you'd put it off, but in a crisis this isn’t an option--you're obligated to forge ahead and hope for the best. At these moments a simple way to prepare for a tough conversation is to role-play the first few minutes with a trusted ally. The purpose isn't to "rehearse your lines"—it can be an unhelpful distraction to feel that you need to stick to a script, and if you come across as overly prepared you can create a sense of distance between yourself and the other party. Nor is the goal to predict the outcome--most interpersonal exchanges are too complex and dynamic to predict beyond a few rounds, and if the conversation takes an unexpected turn you'll be at a disadvantage. [10]

The real value of role-playing a difficult conversation is that it simulates the emotional state you're likely to experience in the actual interaction, so that you're better prepared to manage yourself while in the grip of those feelings. This is why it’s important to truly commit to the experience in the role-play and not simply go through the motions. The ability to suspend belief and "act as if" you're really having the conversation is essential to the process.

Note that a useful variation is a "reverse role-play," in which a trusted ally adopts your role, and you adopt the role of the other party. This allows you to get a perspective on how your position might appear to the other party and to get a sense of how their position feels to you.

4. Slowing Down

Finally, you need to recognize that in a crisis you're operating under high levels of stress constantly, which can easily create a sense of acceleration and urgency. And when you're that stressed your ability to process information diminishes, so you must remind yourself to slow down, to pause before responding, and even to ask someone to repeat what they said because we want to be sure we understand them correctly. [11]

And this brings us back full circle to self-care, because the hard work of slowing down when the world around us is speeding up is only possible when we're sufficiently well-rested and addressing our other physical, emotional, and mental needs.

 

---

Footnotes

[1] Importance vs. Urgency

[2] A set of resources on sleep.

[3] Get Moving! (Exercise for Busy People)

[4] Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)

[5] Low-Carb High-Fat (LCHF) Resources

[6] Watch That Next Step (CEO Problems)

[7] Brené Brown, Vulnerability, Empathy and Leadership

[8] The Tyranny of Feelings

[9] The Friendship of Wolves

[10] Learning to Yield (Navigating Tough Conversations)

[11] The Importance of Slowing Down

Updated April 2022.

Photo by Andrew Magill.