Archives for September 2020

Want to be in an Open Yes State?

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There’s something about being “open” that creates a certain state of mind that can be very useful in difficult conversations.

Gordon White and I teach an 8-step model for Difficult Conversations.  It’s one that leverages the combined 50+ years we bring to our conflict work as mediators, teachers, coaches and writers.  We’ve really enjoyed the experience of creating the model and a course to go along with it.  These last few weeks, we’ve been working on recording an online version (which I hope to tell you more about in the coming months!).

One key piece of our model is preparing for how you want to manage your emotional state going into a difficult conversation, so that you set up the conversation well.

One exercise we teach comes from Dr. Daniel Siefel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. He has done this exercise with his patients who are not particularly aware of their bodily states until he helps them with the noticing. The exercise is also something Gordon and I have adapted and named the “Yes/No Exercise” and it helps raise self-awareness about what our bodies feel like in a “Yes” state and a “No” state. 

To give you a taste of what we mean: 

When you are in a “Yes” state –you are relaxed, receptive, resourced and therefore able to draw on your best self to continue through a difficult conversation.  Outside factors can contribute to a Yes state, including how much sleep you’ve had, whether you’ve moved your bodies that day, or if you’ve heard a good joke!

The “No” state is the opposite, those times when you are feeling stressed and therefore you become more closed, and less able to access your resourced self. This is the reactive mode and we all have that state as well.

It can be incredibly helpful in difficult conversations to be more aware about whether we are in our “Yes” state or “No” state or traversing somewhere between the two states. 

The exercise we do in our teaching involves someone saying the word “No” out loud seven times while you observe yourself in reaction to the word.  You could even record the word seven times into your phone and play it back to yourself.  You become a detective as you identify what your self-talk is and how your body feels and reacts in a “No” state.  That same is then done with the “Yes” state.  Say the word “Yes” seven times and notice how your body and your self-talk responds to the word.

This exercise could be done repeatedly as a way to strengthen awareness about whether you are slipping into a “No” state. This is a powerful practice, because the more we notice we are slipping away from our resourced selves, the more choice we have to take the simple steps we all know to calm down.  We know breathing or counting to ten works in conflict, but unless we have the capacity strengthened or planned out that we will attend to our bodily and self-talk realities, we can easily slip into the stressed zone and create inadvertent damage.

Siegel even wrote a whole book about this that he called the Yes Brain.   As summarized:

The Yes Brain

  • Flexible, curious, resilient, willing to try new things and even make mistakes.
  • Open to the world and relationships, helping us relate to others and understand ourselves. o Leads to true success because it prioritizes our inner world and looks for ways to challenge our whole brain to reach its potential.

The No Brain

  • Reactive and fearful, rigid and shut down, worrying that it might make a mistake.
  • Might lead to gold stars and external success, but does so by rigidly adhering to convention and the status quo and becoming good at pleasing others, to the detriment of curiosity and joy.

What I love about the concept of a “Yes” state and a “No” state is it allows for the possibility that we complex beings.  We all can be rigid at times and open at other times.  The more we can companion ourselves, be witness to ourselves, and stay connected to ourselves, the more choices we create in the world and the more harmony we can have in our lives.

It starts with noticing what a “Yes” state sounds like and feels like to you and a “No” state and being able to switch from No to Yes.  The more we are in our Yes state, the more open we are.

“We often think that there is just one way to look at things – the way we always have. In fact, there are an infinite number of ways to look at most everything. An open mind allows for a multitude of perspectives from which to choose in any given moment. That suppleness of mind allows for true choice, and opens us to a whole new realm of possibility.” …  Jeffrey R. Anderson, The Nature of Things – Navigating Everyday Life with Grace

Let An Animal Change You

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Recently, my friend Kate Rubin told me about a CBC radio show interviewing the author Richard Louv on his new book Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can Transform Our Lives and Save Theirs.  The basic premise is that interacting with animals all around us, and in a conscious, mindful way matters to us and to them.  He says we’ve all had these encounters but may not notice them or retell them, and that it is the stories of these encounters and the retelling of them, that carries the medicine of change. The more we tell them and hear them, the more meanings are revealed.

This rings true for me, as an English Literature major, where I would read and re-read stories and find deeper and deeper layers of meaning revealed to me as I sat with the stories. Louv has gathered amazing stories of contact with animals, wild, domestic and in-between.  My friend Kate was particularly impacted by a story Louv tells about an oceanographer’s close encounter with an octopus, which appear to be about two conscious beings communicating.  Hearing Kate tell it, impacted me as well in her telling, so much so that I found the story to hear it myself. 

Here is the radio show.  Fast forward to 8 minutes, 30 seconds to 11 minutes, 35 seconds, where the radio show tracked down the oceanographer and captured the story directly from the source. Paul Dayton is the oceanographer who tells us his story about an encounter with an octopus 50 years ago.

One thing that struck me is that Paul put himself in a state where he forcibly relaxed himself and was able to connect deeply with the other animal from that state of consciousness  Being in touch with ourselves, our breath and our place of calm does bring us into the present moment where, it seems, connection resides.

I wrote an article a while ago about encounters I had with squirrels when growing up.  It stayed with me although I was a child at the time.   The squirrels taught me how to be in that present moment, as it was only when I was completely calm and “going slowly” that one of the squirrels would come forward and gingerly take a peanut directly from my hand. We had an understanding in those moments and those encounters and part of the pact was this going slow consciousness.

Louv’s contention is that there exists a network of transcendent connection and that it is all around us and accessible by connecting with animals of various sorts – from birds going by to the cats in our neighbourhood.  We need only tune in – to pay attention consciously – to that life around us.

This inquiry opens my experience to realize I’ve had these connective moments often, perhaps almost daily.  But I didn’t have the words for it.  Louv supplies those.

Have you had any encounters with animals that have impacted you?

“To protect anything, we have to know it and to protect it.”  … Richard Louv

The Gift: 12 Lessons To Save Your Life

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About 10 years ago, I discovered I was half Jewish.  There’s a story there, but that’s not the point this time!

The reason I’m telling you is that a genetic genealogist who is helping me follow my blood lines, told me she was heavily impacted by discovering that there are large batches of people who die all on the same day in my blood line. 
 
The Holocaust.
 
I grew up as someone who did not identify with being Jewish, as I didn’t even know that I was.  Over the last decade, the various implications come to me step by step.
 
When I shared this latest revelation by the genealogist with a friend, she sent me an incredible interview with Dr. Edith Eger who’s become a heroine of mine.  Dr. Eger lost her mother and many others to the concentration camps and after a lifetime of healing work, she’s come out with her second book at the age of 92. This one is entitled The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life.
 
The interview she did with Marie Forleo, which is the one my friend sent me, is worth a watch.  Check it out here.
 
So much to be learned from Edith, including this quote from her book, but there are so many lessons really, I can hardly choose:
 
“I work from the understanding, shared with my beloved mentor, friend, and fellow Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, that our worst experiences can be our best teachers, catalyzing unforeseen discoveries and opening us up to new possibilities and perspectives.  Healing, fulfillment, and freedom come from our ability to choose our response to whatever life brings us, and to make meaning and derive purpose from all we experience – and in particular our suffering.”
 
And in conclusion she tells us:
 
“Freedom is a lifetime practice, one we get to make again and again each day.”
 
I have the freedom to choose how to look at my growing Jewish identity.  I could look at it as meaningless (who cares that my DNA says I have Jewish ancestry).  I could look at it as a type of pain (how is it that I never knew?  I was abandoned).  Or I could look at it as a gift.  It is a gift that I am here at all.  It is a gift my direct relatives survived the Holocaust.  And, it certainly is a gift that I was shielded until now from the conscious knowing of all the pain my ancestors have suffered. 
 
To life!

5 Common Traps for Leaders & What To Do About Them

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My colleague Gordon White and I have been diving deeper and deeper into the world of leadership, conflict, organizations and teams. There is much overlap and complexity and what can help is to think systemically.
 
Thinking systemically about conflict, as a leader, is a core skill for those wanting to transform conflict from something toxic and destructive to something growthful and healing. 
 
Thinking systemically means pulling back and not being lost in the weeds of what is being presented to you.  As with most things, the learning starts with awareness.
 
As a leader, one of the most common conflict leverage points is when an employee comes to you with a concern about someone else. Here are some common ways to respond which are not particularly effective. I’ve also included an alternative for each one:
 
What Not To Do:
 1 – Tell the person this is gossip and you don’t gossip
This response virtually guarantees you will NOT get to a productive place.  Chances are very good the conflict will go underground, fester and probably flare up somewhere else and with even more ferocity.   Presumably, this is not what you want as a leader. Gossip is something we all do (see my thesis “Dirty Little Secrets” for more details). It’s not gossip that is the problem, but how it is managed.  As leaders, gossip can inform you of hidden problems or forewarn you of situations that could turn into problems.  What you do with the gossip is what matters.

2 – Tell the person you will take care of it
Oftentimes, when people are upset enough to come talk to their manager about someone else, they have been stewing on things for a while.  They can come to you with some emotion in their voice and a resignation that they have tried everything and now don’t know what else to do. It is very tempting at this point to be the avenging angel for this person.  However, the old adage “there are two sides to every story” is of the utmost importance in conflict. There are in fact multiple perspectives! If you can start to see yourself as a leader-mediator, this is a core capacity to hone: holding multitude of perspectives.  Remember that whatever this one person is saying makes perfect, logical sense from their perspective.  And the other person will have an equally coherent perspective. Keep your curiosity open and intact, as logical as the one perspective may sound.

3 – Go and talk with the other person immediately
Another temptation is for you to take on the problem as your monkey on your back and go talk with the other person as soon as one party says something to you. The person putting forth the complaint will often say:  “Well, I tried everything and it hasn’t worked.”  Or “I’m afraid of what could happen, I can’t deal with it.”  Or, an old favourite:  “That’s why you get paid the big bucks – you deal with it!”  To complicate things further, there are important ethical, legislative and Human Resource requirements and expectations that you as a leader take responsibility for conflict in your workplace and deal with it.  However, too many times, leaders end up playing amateur police officer, going to the other party with a fist full of accusations.  What’s important, whether you do decide to talk with the other party or not, is to ensure the conflict will be dealt with and to be clear on the facts. Have you taken the time to ask the first person exactly what the situation and behaviours and incidents are?  It’s too easy to hear an inflammatory word like “disrespect” and not stop to ask what actually was said or done that this person has named disrespectful.  Having majoring in English Literature in University, and then doing post-graduate work in Applied Linguistics, I am very aware of the power of words to confound and confuse or clarify and enlighten. Many times, when the step is taken to slow down and clarify what the specific behaviours and incidences were, new clarity about what can be done next arises.

4 – Tell the person to deal with it themselves
Saying you expect the other person to deal with it themselves, can seem like another logical possibility.  Why not?  Well, this person would not have come to you if they knew how to go deal with it themselves.  If you tell them that, they may receive it as a message that they can’t ask you for help.  So what does that mean for you?  This is where your role as a mediator leader/conflict coach is also important. It might be that they need some help clarifying and finding their motivation.  Some well-placed questions to help them think through the possible risks and benefits of having the conversation, both from their and from the other person’s perspective, could be very impactful. They might need help figuring out how to start the conversation or how to make it more meaningful than it’s been to date. Most of us need help with those difficult conversations, not to be told to deal with it ourselves.

5 – Ignore it

Lastly, what about just leaving it?  Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill philosophy?  As many conflict-competent leaders have learned, often the hard way, leaving conflict alone doesn’t make it go away.  Conflict has a way of hiding out, biding its time and then popping up elsewhere.  So what are you to do?  When someone first comes to you, see your responsibility to help move that conflict to a new, more productive place. Your first obligation, then, is to clarify what exactly happened. What is the situation, beyond the generalizations, the blaming words, the loaded language?  When someone says they think they were “bullied” – what did the other person actually do that led to this person concluding that it was bullying?  If the person says they were disrespected, once again, what were the situations, the incidences, the facts?  You have an obligation and a responsibility as a leader to “investigate” when an employee brings you information and their perspective.  What does it mean to investigate, however?  Choosing to ask questions that help clarify the facts helps everyone get more clear what they actually have in front of them and it helps you get more clear on what you can do to be of most help.
 
I hope these 5 common traps help you avoid them and choose another pathway instead! Keep tuned for more surprises from Gordon White and I in the months ahead!

“Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides.”  … Frank Tyger