You get the idea. By asking questions and listening to herself, she can find out what’s really shaping her thinking and she can begin to find her own growth edge—the place that might mark out the territory of the person she’ll be next.7 In this case, it sounds like Alison might be relying too much on the perspectives of others in order to believe things herself. As she wonders who she might be next, she might want to have a little more of that belief system inside her, so that her clothes—and the board—wouldn’t determine how she felt about the change she was making.
Knowing about where we are in our developmental map and thinking about who we might become next allows us to release some of the pressure of defending where we are, and encourages us to look with curiosity at the way life is supporting us to grow into the next version of ourselves.
7
BUILDING A LADDER TO ESCAPE THE MINDTRAPS
Alison led the last of Mark’s team through the house and on to the back deck as the first bottle of champagne opened with a pop.
“What, no Thai food?” Kendra teased.
“But veggie burgers in three varieties!” Mark called out from the barbeque.
“I’ll do that,” Alison said, taking the apron and tongs from Mark and handing him a glass of champagne. “You go celebrate.”
Mark gathered his team together and raised his glass: “To the launch of PurpleChat, our newest—and soon to be most successful—app!” There were smiles and clinking of glasses as they all reveled in their accomplishment.
“And to the three different variations of it that are all swimming around in the ether, collecting data for us!” Kelly added, raising her glass again. The several different choices that had emerged as they faced their disagreement in a new way had found their way into different test options for customers—and more learning for the team.
“Here’s to having dinner most nights with our families instead of you yokels!” Marcus added, his voice tinged with relief. The others smiled broadly and called out congratulations for his new baby, who was due in three weeks.
Leroy raised a glass to Mark. “Here’s to your fantastic team engagement scores and the way you have been able to deliver your product launch on time, and without killing you or your team!” They clinked again, and Alison poured more champagne into their rapidly draining flutes.
“Seriously, Leroy,” Marcus said. “We could never have done this without you. We were getting lost in our old patterns, working harder and harder but not making much progress. I was honestly worried that this job was actually impossible—or that I was a total failure. And it was really tough on my home life with my wife struggling so much with the pregnancy.” Others nodded their heads. That sense of overwhelm and failure had been palpable on the team.
“Here’s to Leroy!” Kendra said, raising her glass again. “Who helped us all escape from the mindtraps and find a new approach so that we could actually get our work done and not feel horrible about ourselves. Now, what’s the next thing we’re supposed to master, O Wise One?”
“Master the traps, yes!” Leroy answered in his best Yoda voice. “And build a better ladder.”
“A ladder?”
“Sure. It’s one thing to have a key to escape each trap individually, and that’s what we’ve been practicing. But building a ladder to climb out of the traps more generally is an excellent long-term strategy.”
“Here’s to ladders and other DIY tools!” Mark toasted again, perhaps getting more interested in the toasting than the toasts.
“That’s a cool idea, Leroy. I’d like to hear more about how to build this ladder,” Kendra said earnestly. “I have been practicing with the various techniques you and Mark have been teaching us, but I still feel like I have a long way to go.”
“Of course there’s a long way to go,” Leroy answered her. “This is the whole story of our lives. We’ll never escape the mindtraps altogether, but we can strengthen our connections to our purpose, to ourselves, and to each other in order to gradually live a life with fewer and fewer traps in it.”
“I’ll drink to that!” Mark toasted.
BUILDING THE LADDER
Each of the mindtraps has its own particular escape path and each of those paths makes us more complexity-friendly in general as we learn to ask new questions about our lives and our thoughts, listen more deeply to others, and find a way to continually learn from our lives. This book has been about the keys to escape the mindtraps that come up as quirks of our human attachment to simplicity and certainty. As we use these keys, we are unlocking new possibilities in the uncertainty and complexity all around us. (You can see a summary of this in Table 1.)
Even better, there are a series of generally helpful practices, though, that aren’t specific to any single mindtrap. To really become someone who doesn’t need to rely always on these keys and who can begin to escape the mindtraps without effort, we need to build a ladder that helps us climb out of the mindtraps as a whole and into bigger versions of ourselves.
The rungs of this ladder are built of the material that creates what’s biggest and best in us as humans: a connection to our purpose, to our bodies and our emotions, to compassion for ourselves and one another. With all of the modern focus on the science of complexity, on neuroscience, and on the interconnections between our bodies, our minds, and our contexts, perhaps the most helpful tool is one of the oldest: mindfulness. This does not mean we need to sit on a hard floor or chant in Sanskrit. Yet some of the most up-to-date science points us in the direction of some of our most ancient teachings.
TABLE 1
Summary of the Mindtraps and the Keys to Escape Them
Each of the elements that follow is a version of mindfulness, and in each of them I offer you a guiding question or practice that is grounded in robust theory and research. I feel passionate that we don’t have to simply fight our human quirks but can find ways to understand ourselves and one another better, and these practices help us do that. But I’m not just offering advice; I’m taking it too. You see, I wrote this book during my second time with cancer—a local recurrence of the breast cancer I had had two years earlier (as Keith and I were finishing Simple Habits for Complex Times1). I learned the news from a call with my surgeon thirty minutes before I needed to teach a group of sixty senior leaders how to handle complexity, ambiguity, and change (note to self: don’t ever take a call from an oncologist before you have to perform anything).2 So the world has helped me learn quite a lot about what it means to face complexity and uncertainty and which practices, mind-sets, and ways of being can help us not only get by but thrive in a world that is constantly providing us with the unexpected.
In complexity, it is the number and form of the connections in a system that make the difference. In life, it is the number of deep connections to other people that matters to our health and well-being. A few practices about connection will help us build the ladder to climb out of the mindtraps and feel a little less lost in the uncertainty of it all.
Connecting with our purpose
The gift of the mindtraps—the thing they evolved to do in the first place—is to give us a shortcut to make decisions so that we are not swamped by all the complexities around us. The mindtraps are only a problem because each of the shortcuts becomes a trap in an uncertain and complex world. If we’re going to stop falling into these reflexive ways of handling our lives, we need a purposeful replacement. Perhaps the most important rule for escaping the traps while not getting blown off course is to connect to a deep purpose and live toward that. It’s vital to keep exploring until you find that space that is most meaningful to you, and then continue to explore that purpose as it grows and changes while you grow and change. In my work with leaders of all sorts, I am continually surprised at the ways we get so busy with the details that we forget to keep looking for the larger purpose of our lives. Without that larger purpose, we will struggle to find the keel that keeps us steady in the howling winds of change. And, it turns out, without the larger purpose, our
lives are not only less meaningful but shorter too.
Professors Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiono reviewed data from more than six thousand people to look at the connection between life purpose and longevity. Hill writes, “Greater purpose in life consistently predicted lower mortality risk across the lifespan, showing the same benefit for younger, middle-aged, and older participants across the follow-up period.”3 In their research they found that it didn’t matter whether you actually accomplished your purpose—it was pursuing it that seemed to matter. And no matter at what point you found your purpose, it helped you (though the authors muse that perhaps the earlier you find your purpose, the earlier the benefits might accrue).
Discovering your purpose is not like finding the perfect pair of shoes (although that’s no simple feat either). But there are hints that help you look in the right direction. First of all, it’s not about money. While having enough money is important to our happiness, it is a means to an end (and only in limited ways) and not an end in itself.4 Second, the purpose that will help you most is not about your fame or your ego. Those are traps, remember? Third, it’s probably not something you could ever accomplish fully. “Make partner by thirty-one” is a goal. “Create artistic experiences that elevate people from their daily existence and bring them to more joy and compassion” is a purpose. The purpose that is most supportive of our health and happiness is almost always about something bigger than us; it’s about making the world better in some way for your having been here. Find that purpose and live toward it, and one rung in your ladder is solid.
Avina was a senior director in a professional services firm with a specialty in US healthcare. She found herself very often trapped by her ego, which had been built on a whole career of rightness and coming up quickly with simple stories that her well-honed pattern recognition could quickly sort and solve. Her purpose, as she held it, was very much imported from her firm: improve operations flow in the high-dollar operating rooms, shorten length-of-stay for hospital visits, and above all cut costs by reducing the number of uninsured people in the emergency room. As her work got more complex, though, right answers became more elusive and her simple stories became unhelpful rather than helpful. At first, she held on tightly to her need to simply improve: to become more right and to have simple stories that were more effective. As she connected more deeply into a higher-order purpose—to fundamentally improve the lives of people who were unwell, not just increasing the length but increasing the quality of their lives—she found she could much more easily let go of her need to be right and her desire to create and tell simple stories. Her ego, which had been built on being socialized into her expertise (“I knew how to help clients make more money”) became looser as she began to self-author this new purpose for herself and for her firm (“How do we use what we know about hospital efficiency and health outcomes to inspire our clients to find creative solutions that improve the lives of hospital workers and patients as well as the bottom line?). She realized that maybe it would be okay—or even better for everyone involved—to have complex stories and to ask questions without knowing the answers in advance.
So how can you uncover this sort of guiding purpose for yourself? Frederick Buechner says that your purpose, your calling, is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” It is a necessarily interconnected dance between what calls each of us and what the world calls for. My personal purpose right now is about creating space for humans to connect more often to the love and compassion that I believe is part of the core essence of our humanity. Others might find that purpose too touchy-feely. Their purpose might lie in bringing more public awareness to climate change, in creating more efficient and effective workplaces, or in supporting young people to be the adults the world will need tomorrow.
Notice what activities have given you the most energy over the day. Now think of those you would feel most proud of people knowing about, and about how those contribute to the world in some way. Which would you be doing even if you didn’t have to? It is not happenstance that so many people find their purpose after a tragedy or a cancer diagnosis. Coming to terms with our mortality makes each day a little more precious and makes it more urgent for us to do something meaningful with the blink of time we have on the planet. Sometimes it helps to think of how our daily lives would look abstracted onto our memorial plaque or tombstone. You might not want “Devoted to Binge-Watching Only the Finest TV Shows” to be the lasting memory of you, carved into stone. But you also might not want “Worked Tirelessly on Behalf of Owning Her First BMW by 26.” Finding your purpose and living toward it is as much a process of discovery as it is of creation. Create the conditions for that awareness to emerge for you, and then see if it can shape your future.
Practice: Each day see if you can find at least one moment where your deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet, and jot down what that might look like on a plaque. Even if these are tiny moments—“Made a child laugh” or “Eased the load for a colleague by helping her solve a problem”—they are the seeds of your purpose. Collect them, and the shape and colors of the evolving garden will bloom.
Connecting to our bodies
The second rung on the ladder that helps us climb out of the mindtraps is with you all the time, but you probably don’t notice it that much. Our bodies are constantly giving us signals that nearly all of us ignore. We need to be more connected to what they are telling us, because they keep us grounded in what is rather than allowing our minds to trap us with what might or should be.
Nabil was trying to show up better in meetings, be less visibly impatient and annoyed. At first his goal was to disguise the feelings he knew were inevitable, but then he realized that he was falling into some classic mindtraps that were causing some of those feelings. His desire to control the outcome of a discussion was fighting with his desire for all of his team members to get along with each other. As those two mindtraps battled within him, he became frustrated—not just with the others but, he realized, with himself. Beginning to pay attention to his body left him with new ways to escape those mindtraps altogether. He noticed that the emotion of impatience and annoyance was accompanied by the sensation of a tight chest and racing heart. He recognized those as symptoms of anxiety as much as annoyance and was able to remember why he was anxious. He saw the traps. The mindtrap of control was escalating his fear that the group would not make a decision and that he (as the CEO) would be held responsible for that. The mindtrap of agreement was making him hold his tongue because he didn’t want to cause strife in the group. That led him in uncomfortable circles—no wonder he was so impatient and annoyed! He started to simply name his underlying concerns at the meeting: “Hey, I’m noticing that we’re circling this topic, and it might be that the rest of you are finding we’re progressing, but I’m a little nervous that we’re not getting very far.” And he pushed against his need for harmony by reminding them (and himself) that productive disagreement might be a help: “I am wondering whether there are things that we aren’t saying that might be getting in the way. It’s important for us to voice our disagreement with one another so that we can expand our thinking and get to the best solution.” Noticing his bodily response, connecting it to his emotional response, and talking about both of them not only helped Nabil resist the annoyance and irritation but helped him lead his team with more honesty and grace.
The idea here is simply to connect to your body and begin to treat it as a source of knowledge and support rather than the vehicle that carries you from meeting to meeting and sometimes breaks down annoyingly. What we have learned about the connection between our thinking and our bodies is surprising—and it is often backward. We think that our stomach tightens up because we are nervous or that our lips curve into a smile because we are happy. Actually, as with so many complex systems, there is no clear one-way causal direction here. Sometimes we become nervous because we were hunching over and clenching our stomachs and that motion released cortisol that our brain tra
nslated into anxiety; we become happy because we smiled, and the smile made our body release dopamine.
Practice: It is amazing, the power of simply noticing and naming our bodily reactions and connecting them to the mindtraps. Sometimes it works for people to just stop and ask themselves: What is my body feeling right now? Is it reacting to any of the traps? Other times people are triggered by a response they’re having (“I just got so angry!”) and that helps them remember to look for physical signs (“What’s going on in my body right now?”). Speaking as someone who has sometimes struggled to remember I have a body, this practice has opened up whole worlds of information I never had access to before. For in addition to our creating simple stories outside us, we create simple stories about what’s going on inside us as well. Our bodies are the universal key that unlocks those traps. I still need to make a conscious practice of it, stopping throughout the day to simply do a quick scan of my body and what it’s telling me, but I am more tuned into my body than I ever have been before—and its teachings are more generally available than ever before.
Connecting to our emotions
The third rung on our ladder is our connection to our emotions. Make no mistake—your emotions are guiding you all the time. We humans are emotional beasts, and there’s no way around that power (and really, would we want there to be?). In fact, it’s often our emotions that create the conditions for us to fall into the mindtraps in the first place. The practice here isn’t to try to escape our emotions in any way, but to simply connect to them explicitly rather than being led by them without our noticing. Paying attention to the subtleties of our emotions and watching for whether we have fallen into a mindtrap helps us climb the ladder into a more intentional way of being. There are two pivotal pieces about being connected to our emotions that will help us unlock our own possibilities.
Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps Page 10