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The Positivity Paradox and the Suppression of “Negative” Emotions

by on February 14, 2018 in insight, leadership, Paradox, personal energy, purpose, Work

Lots of press about positivity these days. Dr. PurpleMandala is positive about that. What she likes is that beneath it all and fundamentally, the premise is that you are in control of how you experience the world and thus, how you perceive the world. No one else. That does not mean only experiencing positive emotions. It means experiencing the full range of your emotions to understand and perceive your world so that you can navigate it toward your purpose. Your emotions are data and that data is telling you something. From this viewpoint, how can any emotion be negative?

In her book “Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life,” Harvard Medical School professor and psychologist Susan David explains the reflexive ways we handle emotion. She says we have a “Tyranny of Positivity” that not only encourages us to ignore emotions like sadness, anger, despair, and grief but that also we live in a culture that actively promotes vehicles to suppress them.

The relentless expectation to be positive inundates our worklife, homelife, and innerlife. We deny or avoid emotions that might indicate something other than life is great. When we can’t ignore them on our own, our culture gives us many things to distract us: media, alcohol, and drugs top this list. It makes for a cold and lonely world where each one of us believes that we are the only one to recognize the breakability of our existence and the grief that comes from losing people and things for which we care about as we move through life.

There is a paradox for leaders embedded in the Tyranny of Positivity. If a leader is to be relentlessly optimistic to inspire and engage the team, how can they also be authentic without displaying their less socially acceptable emotions, too? This is the essence of the Positivity Paradox. Research has indicated that Hope, Self Confidence, Optimism, and Resilience, in combination, have the strongest relationship with both satisfaction and performance. Sometimes humans, even leaders(!), must move through a murky pool of less socially acceptable emotions. How do you acknowledge your emotional state? How do you identify all your emotions, not merely the positive ones, in a productive and insightful way to add to your innerlife? Can you wrestle with all your emotions of your innerlife? And our innerlife positively affects our worklife and homelife. What are you going to do about it?

Steve Martin on Success

by on September 7, 2015 in insight, leadership, personal energy, Psychology, purpose, Work

“I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.” -Steve Martin.

Why are Organizations so Fouled-up*?

by on August 24, 2015 in insight, leadership, organizations, personal energy, Psychology, purpose, Uncategorized, Work

It was a question my husband asked over this morning’s breakfast after another of my rants about organizational politics. The answer I gave him was this: You’re fouled up, I’m fouled up, that makes organizations, which are full of people as much or more fouled up as us, even more so. How can organizations not be anything but fouled up given all that fouledupness brewing and simmering together? Then you throw in money and power, and the fouledupitude goes wild. Sadly, he agreed. I’ve consulted or been in over 50 organizations at this point, and I know that there is not one organization that is not fouled up. I challenge you to find one.

How do you avoid being consumed by all the fouled up people in fouled up organizations? Maintain a positive attitude and remember to not take it personally. Even if it is personal. People don’t know you well, so most of any feedback you get is to ensure you meet the organization’s goals or are projections of their insecurities. Or you could be one of the people others are talking about that are so fouled up! Then perhaps you should listen, and listen very carefully.

Now and then a team or a small group of individuals unite around a common purpose and have transparent and authentic relationships with one another. Their whole selves come to the experience, and they focus on something that not only meets their immediate goals but also meets some more lofty purpose. That is the trick for any leader: Alignment of individual and organizational purpose. There are glimpses of it here in there, like the glimmer around Peter in Fringe, where Olivia knew he was from a different world.

*Please substitute foul for any other f word you might choose to use

What is Your Internal State?

by on August 14, 2015 in insight, leadership, Paradox, personal energy, Psychology, purpose, Uncategorized, unconscious, Work

As a wise colleague once said, “If you want to find something on the outside, you must first find it on the inside.” Or, in other words, “wherever you go, there you are,” a saying popularized by Buckaroo Bonzai. While coaching executives and with my ongoing work with myself, the truth is that our internal state is the most important aspect of our lives to attend to and manage. And we can manage it. By doing so, we can direct how we perceive our world, what we get done, and what (and who) we attract.

What is your internal state of being? How do you feel right now? How do you usually feel? What is the noise inside your head?  Are you covering up negative feelings with food, alcohol or some more sophisticated gamesmanship where others are the blame for your problems? With what are you surrounding yourself?  With whom? How are your family and friends with their internal state? What is your purpose? Check-in with yourself and others, you might be surprised how you’re feeling. You can change how you think about things. Your reaction to the world is in your control.

A lotus is the most powerful of flowers as it makes its way through the murkiness to the light. Much like our hidden feelings, they too must make their way to the light. Without this process, they remain ever present, controlling us, sometimes choking and stifling us in ways that we don’t understand and keeping us from seeing the light.

Living in a VUCA world: It’s all about energy

by on October 6, 2014 in insight, leadership, personal energy, Psychology, purpose, unconscious, Work

Madonna’s song “Living in a Material World” captured the mood and feeling of the 1980s. What phrase captures the moment now? According to some leaders of the largest businesses in the world, we are living in a VUCA world. What is VUCA? VUCA is a military acronym that stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.

In my day job, I do research with others in my firm along with a well know international university. We are trying to learn what great leaders do that makes them exceptional. Ideally, we want to identify common themes about their thoughts on various leadership topics and how their reflections might differ from the way you and I go about perceiving our world. Our purpose is to not only be able to identify what characteristics make up superior leaders, but to also understand if what makes them exceptional can be coached or taught to others. We ask ourselves if great leadership can be learned then what is needed to create more of them, so that the world will be better led.

It is apparent to the leaders we interview that the world is a much more VUCA place than it once was. Whether this is true, or whether there is only a perception that is true does not matter to these CEOs. To them, the environment of social media mixed with immediate access to global information creates a complex, ever changing landscape of stakeholders that inverts the classic organizational pyramid on its head.

Interestingly, most of the leaders we have interviewed believe that, positive energy is the element that matters most in their own lives and the lives of others. It’s the key critical resource needed. They claim to focus on requiring this energy to have clear, positive and inspiring points of view. They want energy to manage and attend to the needs of the stakeholders that routinely confront them. They want energy to confidently engage, energize and inspire the teams they build. They want energy to develop depth of expertise and the wisdom to apply it. To them, the mechanistic drone like approach to work that infiltrated the Industrial Age is no longer relevant and definitely slipping away. Are these desires and perceptions different from yours?

How do you help the world be better led? It starts with your next interaction. Be the person, be the change you aspire to see. Become conscious of your real purpose in life and access the positive energy of yourself and others around you. Some might do this on a grander scale affecting many more people, but each of our interactions count; especially if we are to create a new shared consciousness or collective unconsciousness that focuses on a more positive way of interacting in our current VUCA world.

A Brain the Size of a Golf Ball

by on August 11, 2014 in insight, leadership, personal energy, Psychology, purpose, Work

“If you have a golf-ball-sized consciousness, when you read a book, you’ll have a golf-ball-sized understanding; when you look out a window, a golf-ball-sized awareness, when you wake up in the morning, a golf-ball-sized wakefulness; and as you go about your day, a golf-ball-sized inner happiness.
But if you can expand that consciousness, make it grow, then when you read about that book, you’ll have more understanding; when you look out, more awareness; when you wake up, more wakefulness; as you go about your day, more inner happiness.” – David Lynch

Leadership – leading others, your family, or yourself requires consciousness, so the best way to improve your leadership is to expand your consciousness. How do you expand your consciousness? It starts with understanding that you may not have the full picture of reality, or understand other peoples’ perception of reality. This is the primary way that conflict arises: numerous people can view the exact same situation with vastly different perceptions.
Leaders often become leaders because they are comfortable making decisions. They have a level of confidence in their own perception of reality that gives them this ability. Often this confidence is perceptible by those who are unsure about what is happening, and the unsure gravitate toward those who appear surer.
This same attribute can backfire when that confidence continues in new, ambiguous and even chaotic situations. Great leaders continue to increase their consciousness as they become more senior through involving and gathering a broader range of perceptions so that they expand their conscious awareness of what is really going on.
How do you expand your consciousness as a leader? The number one best way is to remain curious. This is especially true when you feel the most sure of your own view. How do you do this? Ask questions. Probe deeper. Listen to the silences, if any, after you speak. Do people feel comfortable sharing their real thinking with you, or do they stammer and hedge their opinions? Has anyone yelled at you or acted angry with you? If not, mostly likely others are holding back around you. By being curious and encouraging other to share their minds and hearts with you, you will ensure you continue to expand your own consciousness, improve your leadership impact and grow your brain bigger than the size of a golf ball.

It is this simple:

by on August 8, 2014 in insight, personal energy, purpose, Work

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” -JRR Tolkien in The Fellowship of the Ring

The Truth About Executive Psychological Assessments

by on June 10, 2014 in insight, Jung, leadership, Psychology, purpose, Work

At the most senior levels of leadership in organizations, psychologists often perform psychological assessments to do two basic things:

  1. Selection: To glean understanding of a leader’s ability to fit within the role, context and culture of a new organization or to ascertain whether a promotion will be successful or not.
  2. Development: To help leaders deepen understanding of their leadership impact through what we call “developmental” psychological assessments.

Assessments themselves vary from in-depth intensive one to one interviews, to full blown – multiple day assessment centers, to online survey tools, or various combinations of these. There is a proliferation of business speak and intellectual debate about the viability of some of these tools, including which are better and which are worse. I’m not here to reflect on the merits of the innumerable different methodologies or tools; rather, I want to discuss why you should do them and how you begin. This leads to who should do them which solves your methodology questions, because in the hands of the right professional, the process and tools become less of an issue.

There are three reasons why you absolutely need to do assessments in the first place:

  1. People lie. To themselves, to their colleagues and to their families. Sometimes unintentionally, sometimes because they do not understand what great looks, sometimes on purpose. Assessments attempt to get to the reality about an individual that goes beyond perception.
  2. Leaders have personal agendas. It is difficult for leaders to distinguish between reality and what they perceive to be true. Leaders project their own fears, dreams, or issues onto those around them if they do not understand this about themselves. Frankly, most do not. It is because of this that it is difficult for leaders to objectively judge the merits of those around him or her.
  3. People are extremely complex. People that think they can uncover everything during a brief interaction are delusional (see points 1 and 2 above). Additionally, online tests and surveys at best capture just a few dimensions.

Here’s how you begin:

  1. Find a business psychologist with a PhD and significant experience working with and within organizations. This is important! There are numerous inexperienced professionals who are well intentioned but have never faced the intricate dynamics of organization life themselves.
  2. Uncover what’s important for your organization to achieve its business strategy. Then marry these criteria to a vetted leadership model. If you must, build your own that speaks to the organization’s unique culture, but ground it in the current best thinking.
  3. Conduct assessments against the criteria developed in the previous step for those entering the organization, for those you promote and for those that you think have a chance to be leaders.
  4. Do this for yourself and your employees. Lead by example, which should be a no brainer, but sadly, it is not.
  5. Craft developmental plans that help people engage in gaining additional insight into their impact. Help them uncover their purpose. Follow up, follow up and follow up. Make it fun.
  6. For a kick, step back and look holistically at your results to determine trends and areas of strengths and weaknesses in your leadership pool; plan accordingly.

And that’s how it’s done. Who knows what might be lying underneath all those smiling faces (or yours)? Having an objective external view of your talent gives you a clear picture of how to manage risk as it relates to executing your strategy. Everything thing else is lies, agendas, and delusion.

Soul Annihilation

by on June 4, 2014 in Psychology, unconscious, Work

“Work is a soul sucking experience,” I mulled during my few moments of eating breakfast this morning. Despite devoting years to trying to understand exactly what this work thing is we do, why we do it, and how to make it less soul sucking, I found myself at ground zero once again.

What event had placed me here? The day before, I had been in yet another corporate meeting where a decision to move forward was in the process of being reversed. It was as a result of a theoretical argument made by non-operations people about how operations “should” be done. There was merit in their view, but it ignored the day to day reality that our operations people had vetted with clients. We were on the verge of postponing a decision that would enable us to put a stake in the ground and to do something different to engage our customers and beat the competition. It was a commitment to change. But people were waffling. Systems theory would have predicted that all systems try to retain homeostasis, so I understood intellectually what was going on in the organization; the organization was attempting to maintain its own center of gravity, that is, protecting itself from change.

But what was really going on with me, personally? Why had this de-energized me? Frustration? Yes. Chagrin? Maybe. But it went much deeper.

When had I been happiest recently? The answer was clear: when I was painting a potting bench my husband had hand-made for me. At the time, I had found my joy curious. With complete and utter wonder, I watched the paint that I had chosen glide like silk over the bench. Side by side we painted, silently caught up in the spell of accomplishment, awed by the results of our efforts and the simple peace of being with one another. There was evident progress and satisfaction from a job well done.

I thought about my draining corporate experience and how something as simple as painting could be so rewarding. Then it occurred to me that what I was experiencing during my breakfast mull was alienation. Karl Marx described alienation as the result of living and working in a world based on social classes. The idea goes that the average person in this complex web of social classes loses the ability to lead their life and chose their own destiny. By working “for” someone, something, (not ourselves) pursuing our own destiny – life, is at best secondary. Many times it is not thought about at all. Thus, we cannot determine the character of our own actions or those of others, define how we relate to others, or own the things and use the value of the goods and services we make with our labor.

I wonder if we are experiencing a spike in the collective experience of alienation. Perhaps the surge and pull for “organic,” moving back to small farms, getting “off the grid”, disconnecting, etc.  is reflective of our collective unconsciousness of alienation. Additionally, there is more marketing on how to simplify your life, some examples of which include a venue called the “Container Store” and a magazine called “Real Simple” that has as its mission how to help you simplify every aspect of your life. (I find it curious that month after month the magazine is quite thick, making me think it is really not so simple to be real simple.)

We all feel this alienation pull at us from time to time, but especially when we experience a disconnection between our destiny and how we make our money. The literature abounds with research and self-help books that proclaim that success comes from doing what we love. Perhaps doing what we love is what helps us also to avoid the abject despair of alienation, too.

I write about perception, hopefully with depth, that helps us more clearly capture our individual purpose. By making the unconscious conscious we ensure we can more closely align what we love with what we do and avoid the feeling that we are mere cogs in a machine someone else created for us.

What makes you happy? When were you last happy? These questions must be mulled over so that we are not lulled into giving up our time and energy for “the other.” Otherwise, where does that leave us at the end of our short precious life?

The Real Indian Experience

by on May 6, 2014 in insight, Paradox, Work

When I was offered the opportunity to work and live in India for a couple of years, it was the proverbial offer I could not refuse. I had been seeking professional and personal transformation, and what better place? The exotic, colourful, and transcendent images that had been built in my mind’s eye over the years about India danced before me – it was like a visual siren call. I had to go.

Reality is almost always different than our dreams, especially when it comes to personal transformation. Sometimes we seek it, sometimes it seeks us. Most often we meet transformation someplace between what we thought we wanted and something quite outside our comprehension.

India is so intense that people believe they get her quickly. This is because she overwhelms the senses so utterly and completely, even on the shortest of trips. I listen to other business travellers talk expertly about her, as if though they know her intimately, all the while staying at 5-star hotels and working with the best and the brightest of the Indian business world. And I also listen silently and somewhat proudly, because of the knowledge that the sliver of shimmering heat, pulsating energy, eye stinging aroma and multi-tiered chaos that they sense through the hotel window or while being driven from meeting to meeting is only the beginning of understanding the depth of diversity -and the difference- that is India. Visiting India is much different than living in India. And I lived in Mumbai, which is India on steroids.

I am profoundly grateful for my time in India and for the person I am as a result. I am, at my core, different than the woman who went there. What follows are the critical lessons that I learned that affect how I view the worldnow. To me, this was the real “Indian Experience.” It is not a story of spiritual transcendence, or a story of developing a razor sharp commercial edge through working in the emerging market. It is more a story of easing into myself and the world, beyond how I defined myself as a person or as a citizen of the US and western world. Paradoxically, this did indeed lead to somewhat of a spiritual awakening and heightened my commercial edge. These are some of the lessons I learned:

  • Relax, it will come to you. Our real estate broker said this when he sensed I was particularly frustrated with trying to execute my western style, lengthy to-do list. I wanted everything done, as you can imagine, now. So I tried to relax and this is what I learned: In India, merely talking to others about what I needed would set a social network in play whereby the things you needed found you. This is how we found our maid, got our car fixed, the mold in our flat removed, found French Vanilla Coffee Mate, and taco shells. I found this process mysterious and amazing. I now employ it everywhere in the world and it works.
  • Nurture your entourage. Most people who work in what is traditionally called “the middle class” and higher in India have an entourage that consists of at least two people: your head maid and your driver. The maid controls your household and can save your life. Your driver controls your “outside-the-house” experience and can save your life, too. This can be the beginning of a empire enabling you to accomplish and acquire most anything available in India, legal or not. One important tip: choose a really good maid and make sure she, your driver and any other person you hire permanently, or temporarily, knows she is in charge. There is a hierarchy that it is best to work with and not fight against. At times, I felt the chain of the command in our flat was Maggie, our maid, then Jim, my partner, then me and then our driver Michael. Our entourage increased by 20 sometimes depending on the task or project. We were brought in to solve major and minor conflicts over roles, processes and outcomes and were seen as benefactors to a slew of family members, activities and holidays. Being American, it was hard for us to position ourselves in a hierarchy, but the learning was that it really was not about us, but about how we could make life easier for those around us, and thus, we found our lives were easier, too.
  • Getting things done is about setting critical priorities. Activity and getting things done can be seen as the same thing in India. Many times, we had to follow up innumerable times to get things completed. Often we would get a lots of running around, people quickly walking to and fro, looking intently at the water heater, the electrical socket, the mold, etc., and then more talking and explaining. Yet often things never quite got fixed. Our conclusion was that people honestly thought they were doing their best to help us, but did not know how. Saying “no” was not an option and even considered rude. Thus the continued swirl of activity without resolution until we eventually gave up on things that were less important. These things were taken off the to-do list. And that was getting it done.
  • Structure is a good thing. Agreement does not necessarily mean something will happen. I had many intense conversations with people and it would seem we would unanimously agree on what to do and the next steps. I was use to everyone immediately beginning to work on our agreed task and next steps. What I learned was that I had to set clear timelines, boundaries and schedules, and inject rigorous follow-up into the process. In other words, I had to work to get things to work. Otherwise, these commitments seemed to be tossed out to the vast social network to get done by other means. If at all.
  • Now I really know what resilience means. The lack of infrastructure makes doing anything in Mumbai difficult. Going to and from work, running errands or even attending social events becomes a struggle. Yes, the roads are rough with holes. Yes, the traffic is horrible. People squeeze five lanes into a two lane road all while people are walking in the middle of the street, holding a hand out indicating they are going to walk in front of an oncoming car without even a mere glance. But there is also an emotional cost of being on the road in Mumbai that can tear on your soul. The sights, the sounds, the smells are riveting, startling, intoxicating and shaming. I would sometimes imagine what the power of India would be should all the infrastructure issues be magically fixed overnight. The power and resiliency that I saw on a daily basis to merely survive could be released into something quite powerful and transcendent.
  • Health is everything. Since I had completed land and water survival courses in the military and travelled throughout the world, my belief was that I was physically resilient, and as a former naval officer, pretty tough. Yet, I had never lived daily within a crowded population with easy access to antibiotics. This environment creates new and highly resilient strains of some of mankind’s long-term diseases like the flu and TB. During my first six months in Mumbai, I had illnesses ranging from pneumonia to an atypical mycobacterium related to both TB and leprosy, along with numerous cases of food poisoning. I dropped 20 pounds in two months and at a certain point could hardly walk. Eventually, I figured out how best to live in Mumbai. Now, I seem super-resilient to whatever bug my American colleagues pass around to one another. My Doctor, who is Indian, says I could go any place in the world now because I have honed my immune system in one of the toughest places. I have a new found appreciation for healthy eating, thinking and existing that I devote considerable time to because I truly know what it means to be sick.
  • American politics look even more ridiculous than I thought they did. Perspective and distance makes us look even sillier and small minded. Enough said.

Like most personal transformations, mine is not what I expected. Through my physical, emotional and intellectual changes, I learned from India in some way to be more myself and let other expectations I had about myself go. There was a sharpening of focus on what was most important and a releasing of things that were not so important. After having lived in an environment where many of my American friends would find horribly intolerable, I found myself truly appreciating, for the first time in my life, the gifts that had come to me merely by being born where I had been born. Without many creature comforts, I found comfort in my relationships. I cared less about anything in popular media save my FB account. I have been back in the US about two months and I still do not know the latest movies or television shows, and the recent rising stars all seem the same to me. The pressure to buy, buy, buy, is never ending, and I understand that I actually don’t need very much, just my health and my relationships. I had searched for peace of mind my entire life. For many, there is peace in this world anyplace you go if you know how to get it. For me, it was through the chaos, drama and the kaleidoscope of my Indian experience that I found peace for the first time in my life.

Written March 2013

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