As a defense we compensate, often also in marginally noticeable ways. I might find myself becoming critical of someone onto whom I’ve projected whatever it is I believe I might lack — including when I can’t even seem to figure out what that thing is. I may well find myself falling into the trap of rationalizing obscure and subtlely painful comparisons as actually being a kind of motivation, leading to even more self-criticism. I see that so-and-so just got promoted (or is having a laugh with the boss) and I suddenly feel a tincture of guilt for not working harder or not looking for a better job. I feel bad in whispers while telling myself it’s good for me to be spurred forward in this way.

And yet, literally, spurs are those nasty little wheels with points, worn on the heel, the rowel driven into a horse’s flank to “teach” it to go forward at our command. In human terms, such teaching pain is frequently meant to drive some form of accomplishment, a mechanical demand that digs a little wound, a little hole into the human flesh of self-esteem. And pretty soon, like the horses, we only need to know the rowel is there to jump ahead.

Comparisons are all about background triggers to baseline emotions, including tough feelings like envy and anger, and it is also about how we learn to shut our emotions down. Comparisons bring us close to the submerged rocks in the path of our ship: not good enough, not deserving; flawed in some dark or ambiguous but always penetrating way.

Have you noticed that some people that struggle with self-esteem are addicted to comparison with others who seem to have something they do not — even, paradoxically when they do possess it but don’t think they do? They may call it modesty, but it’s not really that at all, and it leads to a sense of separation, of not belonging, of addiction to what mystic and philosopher Eckhart Tolle calls the “pain body” that we can’t help but feed with our sense of not living up to a potential or of repeatedly disappointing others. I sense that even if magically they were suddenly to overcome these difficult inner voices they’d worry about pride taking over, a harbored sense of superiority, better than others becoming just as isolating as worse than. It’s all trauma, maybe small t, not big T, but trauma nevertheless.

I lay in my bed as a college student in the late Sixties and before sleep comes to me I notice a phenomenon that is hard to describe. In a way it seems related to that extraordinary Wallace Stevens poem called “Of Mere Being” that begins:

     "The palm at the end of the mind,
      Beyond the last thought, rises
      In the bronze decor...."

Read it at the link if you don’t know it. In the 19 year-old “decor” of my mind, something flashes darkly and draws me in. I would almost call it a hole (maybe a worm hole?) in that decor, if in fact there are words for it, which there are not. It is “beyond the last thought.” I do not realize at the time how important this phenomenon will be or the lasting meaning it conveys. It is the place where spring water bubbles out of the earth. It is the bubble in an infinite darkness from which I have my view of our trembling planet. It is the courage to be who I am, the trust I feel in my identity. The place I rest that is completely outside comparison with anyone or anything at all. Everything is rich, full, connected and there is peace.

I did not know it at the time; it was only an inkling of a discipline and vision toward which I still travel each day, faithful to the journey. I find few apt descriptions of the phenomenon, but Jiddu Krishnamurti comes closest. He says:

“The quality of that silence, that stillness is not felt by the brain; it is beyond the brain. The brain can conceive, formulate, or make a design for the future, but this stillness is beyond the range, beyond all imagination, beyond all desire. You are so still that your body becomes completely part of the earth, part of everything that is still.”

“And as the slight breeze came from the hills, stirring the leaves, this stillness, this extraordinary quality of silence, was not disturbed. The house was between the hills and the sea, overlooking the sea. and as you watched the sea, so very still, you really became part of everything. You were everything. You were the light and the beauty of love. Again, to say ‘you were a part of everything’ is also wrong: the word ‘you’ is not adequate because you really weren’t there. You didn’t exist. There was only the stillness, the beauty, the extraordinary sense of love.”

• The dominance of assertion: statements more than questions, or even observations
• More conversation about what’s wrong with an idea than what’s right with it
• If not by actually talking over one another, then by the immediate stacking of one opinion upon another with no breathing room or silence between statements or between speakers. Silence seems to be viewed opportunistically rather than as a resource for reflection
• Some peoples’ points are simply ignored, spoken over or bypassed
• Barely a moment’s praise for anyone or anyone else’s idea, let alone further curiosity about it
• It sometimes seems that one’s “seat at the table” is best justified by having the last word
• It can feel like people are competing but it’s unclear what they are competing for, perhaps credibility more than anything else
• Some people say almost nothing; other people say almost everything

I confess sometimes I am one of the people who is not saying much, even as the consultant, because there’s so little exploration of meaning going on. It can feel like the group culture contains an implicit demand that people “push into” the conversation and “mix it up,” to advocate a “better” solution — although this may be the very opposite of what’s needed as people race to plant their particular flags. In what I would call more generous groups, there may not be so much interest in whose idea prevails but there may certainly be an interest in proving one’s individual contribution, showing the value of one’s presence in the room and justifies my belonging. That ends up amounting to very nearly the same thing — a focus on the best thought, the best answer, the winning idea.

A more reflective approach would be different. “Shared meaning” suggests not so much the production of a best idea as something that involves a group’s deeper need for alignment, coherence, an understanding that serves as a bridge between people. Something that is the product of more than discussion, a term that comes from latin words for breaking things apart. I’m not sure we have a word that yet quite describes the opposite: putting things together in a deeper, creative, collaborative way. Yet even collaboration may not be that word, the notion of co-laboring bringing to mind only horses in a harness.

You have to be quite intentional in some meetings in order to say:

“That was beautiful. Why don’t we take a moment to reflect on what Mary just said.”

or

“I’m not sure everyone is in this conversation yet. Let’s slow down a moment. Who would like to be heard?”

or

“I’d like to really understand more about what you are saying and I’m curious about the experiences behind your perspective. Help me get what you mean by.…”

or

“I’m having a hard time getting my thoughts out onto this table. I’m afraid all you’ll hear is ‘word salad,’ but I’m willing to try and please help as I may fumble.”

More than anything, I find less reflective, competitive conversations to be based in overactive, intellective, inchoate analysis with little attention to the underlying, sometimes very private feelings and experience of the people who are in the room. It’s frequently about judgment that cuts things short and in so doing may actually avoid the deeper problems that reside there, just slightly off stage.

Admittedly, this is an old topic. It’s been referenced over the years by various authors, such as Peter Senge and Peter Koestenbaum. Senge, for example, calls out how typically there’s little penetrating examination of our underlying assumptions as we go about our problem-solving. And Koestenbaum in his masterpiece of reflective inquiry writes about a group of engineers who constantly argued and got nowhere until they were asked to replace the word “problem” with “pain.” Essentially, they were asked to slow down their conversations enough to share how they truly felt about their problems before trying to address them.

I often notice similar dynamics. In many teams no one is likely to say, “I’m really angry about this” or “I feel guilty about what happened” or “I’m so sad this has come up again” or “I was personally embarrassed by the whole thing and I’d like us to do better.” Feelings that help the members of a team understand where their colleagues and their ideas and judgments are truly coming from. Instead, about the only emotion that ever gets voiced is “I’m frustrated.” Frustration appears to be the only professionally acceptable word for an uncomfortable feeling. The rest can seem more or less taboo, perhaps interpreted as a sign of weakness or vulnerability.

Meaning hardly ever comes from banging on our problems according to their obvious surface facets, depersonalized and abstracted from how we truly feel about and experience them. We’ll be banging on this same problem next year, too. Meaning isn’t in our control in that easily glossed way, I don’t think, although some frequently pretend it is, continuing to push the assumption that with enough raw logical intelligence all problems can be solved (a dangerous accelerant for over-reliance on AI). Meaning may well be deeper down, submerged in the unexamined connections between us, between you and me. Some days it can seem to be there still waiting in the conference room long after we’ve all left for home. Truly it is in us and between us, not someplace “out there” to be possessed alone by a stark victor who first and foremost has won a prize for being right. Too often our subtly competitive meetings, meetings of good people trying to do the right things, may inadvertently work to strip us and our problems of real meaning, doing so without, of course, anyone meaning to do anything of that kind.

What then are we supposed to do?

Well, things often change when people become conscious. Noticing the dynamic as a pattern of how we do things can help — if it leads to constructive group reflection. In addition — and I hope you won’t hear this as too moonstruck — I’d say it’s good to remember that as individuals we come from a loving nothingness and we’ll all be headed back that way soon enough. It’s good to recall that we are just here together. That all we’ve got initially is human connectedness. That we’ve happened to show up in the same room at the same time and yet our individual trips to that room have all been the product of very different paths. That meaning is created but also discovered. That we start as much from what we don’t know as what we do. And it’s about the agency we hold together, what we can do, we can build, we can put together in the face of the darkness according to our vision, our common star wherever it may be; inevitably how we can help and care for each other, defining our humanity.

It’s good to remember we come from that nothingness, to be aware that the nothing is there under us all. Some days you can almost hear it hum.

You’ll have to imagine, if you haven’t walked this path yourself, a thick rainforest, one in a national reserve halfway between Tofino and Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. As I walk into the first part of the trail I stop to read a sign warning about wolves in the area. There have been sightings.

And then the path, barely a hundred yards in and which has been a wide gravel affair, splits into a loop of continuous, kilometer long boardwalk with stairs plunging down into a forest that otherwise would be impassable so dense is the foliage.

Part of me would surely welcome seeing a wolf. They are predators, of course, and have been known to kill small dogs in the area, but we do understand, don’t we, that it’s really their park, not ours and we might be interfering with their routines. And it also makes me wonder about what kind of instinctual predator energies still linger in me. I think perhaps the sign should have read, “Watch for wolves — you’ll be very lucky if indeed you see one so be smart and grateful. If you run into them you might want to pick up your children so they can get a better view and so the wolves also know they belong to you.”

I’m walking now on the wet boardwalk. I’m not as steady as I used to be and I’m alone so I’m careful, measuring what might happen if I slip or trip and fall off into the forest proper. It looks to be the sort of place after a misstep that like a Venus Flytrap might quickly close in around you. Nobody said the journey was going to be safe exactly.

It’s not, perhaps, but it is certainly perfectly beautiful. The air is rich with the earth and its mingling scents of life becoming and dying. Deep clusters of ferns, mosses, mushrooms; leaves fluttering on drenched autumn branches and in the rain some also fluttering down. The boardwalk goes up and down and down again and down further still into a valley among the towering trees, and all the time the sound of water now louder as the rivulets converge. Once in awhile I can actually see the water break out of the ferns growing thickly beside it but mostly the plants are so dense it’s just the sound that announces the little creeks that are passing around me or under the boardwalk itself.

It takes a moment to recognize the design of the path is an intentional thing showing off the layers of the forest’s ecology and its cycles, at least that seems the theme of the markers along the way. It takes a further moment for me to recognize the other metaphor. I’m going down and deeper in. My heart seems to slow. I stop and stand and listen to the implied refrains. My brain stops humming with the usual dross of anticipations, concerns, plans, what if’s, the constant broken record of thinking so that now I’ve forgotten some of how to do that. I’m seeing again, instead and for real; hearing again.

A moment further along I look down once more and I see I’m at the bottom, crossing a deep stream black with tannins from its run across the decaying forest. I look down into that black stream for a long time, merging with it perhaps for an instant or two, and am reminded I’ve come here to encounter in one more way my own soul. To drink from it is to drink the dark tea of my own life and a larger life beyond us all.

After awhile, I am free to move on. The rain is coming down once more and I try to dry my camera as much as possible with my shirt and hide the delicate technology under my coat. The camera, too, is a symbol and the lens, but that’s for a later reflection.

I turn toward the rest of the boardwalk, climbing the stairs uphill past a cedar thought to be over 800 years old. What must living that long be like? How many creatures in that time have rested as I am, nestled next to its massive roots? We come. We go. And the tree lives on, it’s branches in the wind and its roots patiently gathering minerals from the soil for say, 300,000 days.

I climb more stairs and more. The clouds clear away for the late light of the season. My legs are hurting from the climb and I’m sweating. I open my coat to a cool, humid breeze. I walk along more easily, stronger now that the forest has flattened out. Soon I find I’ve completed the loop. I am thinking now that the design of this path with its stairs and boardwalks, its journey down and down to that black stream and then returning to its origin is also the design of a poem. Perhaps one day I’ll write one, I say to myself. In the meantime I say goodbye and trust that the wolves I didn’t see were there hidden all along and heard me whistle to them in the fading light.

Here’s a hypothetical scenario. The story of a conflict might begin with tensions that have begun to erupt and become more public. Hidden at first by Passive Agression and various forms of Resistance, the people involved gradually work their way toward Open Combat. Others see the conflict and take sides. Tentative moves toward Human Contact are subverted as the conflict ultimately heats up and spills out into open mischaracterizations and insults. Ugly words are shared in both directions. It’s enough bad stuff that the leaders are pushed to action. Human Resources initiates an investigation, but perhaps that takes a very long time and it only exacerbates the mistrust. By then some participants are sick of it, become withdrawn and maybe even decide to leave. An embarrassing story is shared with the press about working conditions, poor leadership. Some people lawyer up in fear of coming lawsuits.

Nobody in such a story ever really gets to the stage of Human Contact, which is, I believe, the most powerful and immediate way to deal with conflict, though — here’s the kicker — Contact can’t be forced. It must be chosen by the parties in question. It must be approached in good faith, which means peoples’ intentions, words and behaviors toward one another are sincere and fair.

We could talk about why we don’t get to Contact more easily, why people cling to the first four approaches in the chart. We might hypothesize resistance to the real vunerability associated with Contact. We could call out stubborn egotism or “lack of ownership.” We could discuss the whole psychological safety thing. We could blame trauma, as many do. We might explore Shadow based on Jungian analysis. We could explore Shame and Guilt, Judgment and our proclivity to assign and resist Fault. That might get us somewhere. It might not.

I’m inclined to chock it up to the fact that our sense of individual self is made up of conscious and unconscious parts. The unconscious ones are revealed whenever we are sucked into our emotional fantasies about each other. We imagine and we project and those are typically signs of unconsciousness based on our darker beliefs about other people and about ourselves.

It’s still a dilemma, though. Why don’t we choose Human Contact, given how conscious and aware we try to be and often imply we are?

Why do we keep choosing to suffer, hoping others are simply wrong?

I don’t know.

And I find myself simply observing that we are made of water. A pool of water, known as “our sense of self.” On a good day, untroubled, we can see through the water. It’s truly the most beautiful thing, our little patch of gravel, a mountain stream clear and cold. On that good day, we dip a glassful. The stream is undisturbed, unmuddied. Our conflicts, tensions and the choices we make around them seem far away, and we feel good; maybe even empowered or enlightened.

Then we are just ourselves without any story at all.

And I find myself asking again, “What the hell are we doing?”

• Pushing a negative, reductive belief about an opponent as an absolute truth
• Rejecting meaningful personal feedback of any kind

Displaying these two fundamentally defensive behaviors, especially in ways that are insulting and degrading to others, without a doubt will generate conflict. Keep pushing and you’ll eventually begin to foment violence. This seems to be because these two behaviors represent a an attack on human identity and dignity.

And this is exactly where I see us now — in a state of degradation, our challenged and divided America. Whatever our side, we cannot hear the other side’s criticisms of us and we believe in our heart of hearts that the other side is wrong, bad, potentially or actually evil. Too many of us are so lost that one of our pleasures is reveling in mockery and ridicule of those others, in put-downs, insults, offenses and righteous outrages. We are too often angry and sad. Perhaps we wouldn’t say we get pleasure from the misfortunes of the other side, but privately or unconsciously there it is.

I’ve been studying conflict for thirty-five years, ever since the publication of Driving Fear Out of the Workplace in 1990. One of the messages of that book, although it is about organizations, not societies is that parties in conflict tend to stay in conflict because of what is called a cycle of mistrust – essentially a reciprocal set of negative beliefs and behaviors directed toward one another, displayed subtly or overtly, but always against the other. “She’s manipulative.” “He’s patronizing.” “They don’t care.” “He’s out of touch.” Such cycles are acted out through withdrawal or behind the scenes badmouthing, side-taking, or a plethora of other petty behaviors; if bad enough via outright attacks and efforts to humiliate supposed enemies and “win” power over them. When a cycle of mistrust is operating, people don’t even have to articulate their negative beliefs; they don’t have to say the words because feelings are picked up quite easily when the background beliefs have morphed into fixed truths.

Extrapolating to the cultural divide today the fixed truths are everywhere and are extreme: “They’re racist.” “They are fascists.” “They hate America.” “They want to shut down free speech.” “They are corrupt.” “They are hateful.” “They’re sexist.” “They’re Marxists.” “They’re not real Christians.” “They want to tear everything down.” “They are violent.” It goes on and on, each side feeling offended, working hard to create the most telling, savage criticisms (though, ironically, often entirely the same, such as accusations of hypocrisy) that quickly devolve into personal insults, justified escalations, rote condemnations. As a society we are lost in the work of proving our allegations, arguing about beliefs as if they were facts, as if they were absolutes.

Nobody in this war is actually trying to understand why somone else might feel offended. It’s frankly ludicrous to even imagine it now on a scale that would matter, people openly questioning, asking for information; for instance, asking: “you know, I notice you saying you think I’m authoritarian. Help me understand what it is I’ve said or done (or not said or done) that’s causing you to feel I’m a fascist.” Or, to use a counter example: “you know, you’ve suggested I hate this country. Help me understand what I’ve said or done (or not said or done) that’s causing you to see me as hating America.” As I say, ludicrous.

No, no one is doing this because the divide is not about creating an opportunity for meaningful dialogue; it’s about power and being right, actively denying dialogue precisely because we believe the others don’t want it or are not genuine, are deeply wrong, are ‘bad people’ or some other rationalized cause associated with the cause of saving America. One or both sides might well consider such an invitation to talk directly, honestly, meaningfully as either naive or as a trap, a sign of the very mistrust that keeps driving the conflict. As I say, it’s crazy to even imagine resolution, in part because it’s likely there’s be no agreement on what dialogue even might look like in the context of this war. (It’s certainly not a “debate” or an argument.) No, at present we are locked in a more visceral combat aimed at taking people down intellectually and emotionally, morally, as part of an increasingly physical war based on defending, protecting and justifying our views while insulting and attempting to hurt others — from accusations of whataboutism, comments that “own the libs” in a what’s supposed to be a satisfying way to cutting off Maga members of families as if they are dead. This is the way, painfully, the negative cycles escalate, little by little as they say and then all at once based on retribution, contempt, intentional loss of connection and deliberate and conscious retaliation. Each side wants the other to pay — despite claims and self-righteous claims to the contrary.

“Here, let me explain the truth to you.”

“Here, let me explain the truth about you.”

It’s awful. This is the mechanical and power-based tragedy we enforce on ourselves and others, attacking one anothers’ dignity, trying to wound and cancel one another out based on our certainty that we understand each other’s motives and character; a war in which ultimately everyone is simultaneously villain and victim with the purpose of claiming “it’s not our fault.” It’s only natural to wonder who actively benefits from such a war in which actual assassination is quickly becoming a fringe norm.

In my experience, such negative cycles end only when people begin to challenge their own inner absolute beliefs about others and begin instead to ask for feedback about themselves and their own behavior. This process of rehumanization happens when people finally decide they are sick of fighting because it’s gotten them nowhere, when they are hurting enough, when they are alone and exhausted enough to begin giving up on their negative assumptions about one another and are willing to talk to each other in meaningful ways. (And again, not as an argument or debate, but as a real desire to understand and connect.) Often there’s an inkling that maybe the other side is more human than we thought; a flicker of a notion that they mirror us in some important way.

Apparently, we aren’t there yet. But maybe we’re beginning to get ready. And what are we willing to do about it, really? That’s the leadership inquiry — one we’ll probably have to make into our own souls.

“You don’t want to demoralize them,” he said to his colleagues. “You want to support them but some of them don’t realize that we’re also here to evaluate their work, as well. Especially for some of my Ph.D students, I have to be careful not to criticize lest they go into a doom loop and become less productive. I’ve seen students get feedback from me and turn their work around. But I’ve also seen students who I’m convinced ultimately succeeded only by my saying nothing at all.”

He chalked the difference up to the level of self-knowledge of the student. There were those who knew their work wasn’t what it needed to be and actually welcomed feedback that helped them and there were those who didn’t seem to know their work had problems and either simply didn’t want the feedback or couldn’t handle it and would crash.

All of which has reminded me of Carol Dweck’s articulation of fixed vs. growth mindsets: the importance of being okay with mistakes, with not knowing what to do or how to proceed yet, with having faith in our capacities to grow and learn, and with the understanding that perfection is an unrealistic, soul-killing standard. These problems with the fixed mindset can be traced to a key undermining belief — that intelligence is a fixed thing. You have enough of it or you don’t. And if you don’t, you are in trouble.

The idea of durability in relationships may have a similar aspect. We may believe our connections with others are fragile and fixed and we need to be very careful with them, or that they are evolving, can take some ups and downs and raw moments because that’s how we learn about each other and deepen our relationships.

In the late 1980’s I came across an early edition of The Coach by Steven Stowell and Matt M. Stracevich. It was the first book I read that suggested workplace relationships ought to be “durable,” meaning we ought to be able to share tough performance or conduct feedback without that inevitably leading to someone leaving or getting fired. This was long before our current layers of social discord, learning trends like “resilience,” or advocacy for trauma-informed leaders and teams. To me, through all these passing stages, durable has remained a most powerful word — a growth mindset applied to our capacity to build relationships.

I’m thinking of the professor and his reluctance to offer feedback at all to some of his students while also knowing this is not optimal in terms of his charge as an advisor. It seems to me he didn’t have confidence or didn’t see his role as building relationships as much as technical and analytical learning.

To be fair, that’s not easy work at times and where difficult feedback is concerned, we tend to focus how to be perfect in our delivery of tough news rather than building a relationship that’s a durable container for that news. For example, we place pressure on those offering feedback to be perfectly:

• calm, clear, genuine and honest
• tactful and diplomatic
• transparent regarding the motivation for sharing it
• open to receiving feedback in a reciprocal way
• patient and understanding of another’s defensiveness
• caring for the human being who is hearing something that is painful or hard.

These are all great attributes, and for sure we should work on them. Similarly, as receivers of feedback we put pressure on those receiving feedback to perfectly:

• put aside our defensiveness and listen thoughtfully
• ask clarifying questions and respond openly and generously, creating a dialogue
• be grateful for the willingness of the sender to risk speaking up
• reflect and learn about our potential blind spots
• not take criticism personally and resist blowing it out of proportion
• Understand that it is also emotionally difficult for the person offering feedback

These, too, are attributes that we can all work toward as receivers. However, this is not what I mean by durability. All of these attributes may make feedback safer, but in truth few of us can act in these ways perfectly when giving or receiving. We make mistakes. We get tense. We get upset, meaning hurt or angry or disappointed or guilty. People certainly can and should try to do all of these things, but in a truly durable relationship, people can share and hear the feedback even if it isn’t perfect. Even if as senders or receivers we are both a little freaked out, even if our articulation of the feedback or the response to it involves some false starts, discomfort, awkwardness — pain.

Durable means we accept each other for our failures to be perfect in our connection with one another and to ourselves, especially in raw moments when we are most real, accepting because we understand that as human beings intentions do count when things are rough. This seems to me to perhaps be an essential element of durability. Intention is what keeps us trying to do our best at this, learning along the way from stumbles so that we can work together on a partnership that serves a larger goal and is bigger than our passing “mistakes.” In this regard the willingness to go back and try it again, clean up our messes, forgive ourselves and others for imperfection are all elements of creating genuinely durable relationships, rather than surviving the brittle ones based on isolation. It is the process of living into and through the intention that makes the difference — the difference between an artificial rose, a picture of one we hope to achieve or one living for a short time in a vase versus the real one, one that endures, thorns and all, alive and growing in the wind and rain.

It’s possible we want that perfect version of ourselves as a substitute for a relationship animated by trust. We may see trust, like intelligence, as not something that can grow. We may live feeling that it’s either there or it’s not there, that we or others will only trust so much. I’ve been in many rooms where people tell me that trust has to come first before anything else — like feedback — can happen, but that may well be more a voice of self-protection than anything else. To me, there is no substitute for trust any more than there is a substitute for the scent of roses in a garden. No matter who we are, as leaders we build trust through intention — without guarantees but with persistent hope those intentions merge into a common vision, whether as colleagues or friends, a vision worth talking about and holding to, something we can be especially proud of in its strength and tenure, a beautiful connection, a celebration.

However, it may still be worthwhile to ask about the impacts of this agreement with disagreement. Some intentions are clearly good — to avoid rancor, for instance. But the agreement to disagree also largely means that vulnerability and learning are both curtailed. There probably won’t be any big new insight into the workings of another person or the workings of ourselves, no acknowledgement, for example, where we might have been wrong, no new or refined perspective or change to our behavior, no lesson. We may have worn out the conflict but we have not resolved it.

Suppose — and I think this is quite common — that under all that non-change I continue to operate on the basis of ongoing negative beliefs or assumptions about another person’s style and motives. Applying this mindset as a filter wherever the other person shows up, these assumptions subtly, even unconsciously, continue to color my views even if they are — by “agreement” — unspoken. Things seem okay, but are they? Part of the problem is that through the practice of agreeing to disagree I may learn to suppress my full feelings from my awareness — they only leak when I have a chance to complain behind the scenes.

An example. I happened to be talking with one of my clients, a very hard working manager, and he confessed that every time a certain employee of his asks about my client’s new baby, he hears an attempt to manipulate. They get along well enough, he says, but an undertone is there. “He’s a family guy,” my client explains, “and he’s asking me about my new baby — our first child — because he doesn’t want to work past five. He’s trying to convince me family should be so important. If I buy it he’ll be less on the hook for the hard work past five that his job requires. Obviously he doesn’t want me to work as hard as I do because then he might have to work hard, too.” (This is a true story. I’m not making it up.)

I’m sure you can sense the nature of the conflict between these two managers, but there’s also an internal conflict for my client that may not be as evident, one he generally hides but is willing to share on this occasion. It’s clear he’s being hit by his employee in a spot that’s a little tender. He acknowledges to me he’s working out what it means to be a father. He acknowledges (and his wife has already provided this feedback to him) that whenever he picks up the baby it’s to a solve a problem, not just to enjoy and love and cuddle this new little person in his arms, his son. He’s picking up the baby because the baby needs to be changed, because he’s crying, because he’s hungry. Otherwise, let him bond with Mom.

To treat a baby as an object in this way is tragic. And he can see an obvious parallel to his own management style, a pattern that makes his issues more global. He tells me that he’s at work to solve problems, critique others’ performance and correct mistakes — that’s his purpose. He fills in the technical depth when others don’t know what to do. He’s there to do the work himself if it becomes necessary. He’s not there to relate to other people, he says — and therein lies the not so hidden conflict. When asked about his baby what he hears is that negative assumption about his report’s motives. If he relates, he tells me, meaning he takes the question about his baby at face value and as sincere, then he risks being used. And that’s an intolerable thought.

So he silently “agrees to disagree” about how much work a manager should put in, complaining about it in the background even before any overt conflict between the two of them emerges. He clings to a private and undiscussed negative assumption — which is to say he clings to his own avoidance by wrapping it in an unspoken insult he shares behind the scenes. In this way he stays out of the dark place that is core to the conflict inside himself. If the conflict were out in the open, he might have to go through that most difficult part of the journey, the tight, personally vulnerable space of seeing something about himself as a person, a kind of tunnel — which can truly be quite a mysterious passage for people, one often imagined to be more difficult and painful than it actually is.

Ironically, something can happen on that journey — if it is truly embraced rather than avoided or refused — something that is as much about about forgetfulness as about insight, as much about nepenthe, the mythic drug that alleviates sorrow as about understanding. This is because part of working through conflict means ultimately surrendering some aspect of what we are so sure of in our negative thoughts about other people. At some point, maybe without really being aware of it, some part of the feedback coming our way gets through and we begin to sacrifice — even for just a moment — the self-protective negative assumptions we’ve made about another person.

I think this is often a more or less natural reflex that enables human growth, almost a faculty, one we are lucky to have. Losing focus on our negative beliefs enables us to come closer to ourselves and the discovery that it’s no longer about other people and their motivations. It’s about us and our responsibilities, who we are in truth, not who they are in our fantasies. The faculty helps us stop pretending. We stop believing that we’re being gaslit or victimized and accept some kernal of a truth that has been hard to see. Some would call this recovering a projection, but I’m not sure it’s always about Shadow so much as confronting scattered pieces of old conditioning and fears that simply haven’t yet been understood.

Who knows exactly what real transcendence is and when it will come. It seems to me the best thing is to make all the feelings and worries and negative beliefs about self and others supremely conscious in order to look at them plainly and to pick through them carefully — and then — and this is critical — to give it a rest, maybe even to sleep. Because it’s just insane to hold onto all that nonsense. It doesn’t help to cling and with a little letting go there’s a shift to a simpler heart.

Following the example above, someday I hope my client will be able to say to his report exactly what he said to me:

Ah, my son. He is incredible and when he smiles he lights up the whole world!”

And let it go at that, rather than focusing on some story of how he’s being maneuvered.

All those negative, dark and darker beliefs we store up. All those assumptions. All those fears of what could be done to us. It’s like recognizing that the complicated pre-Copernican algorithms we have used to define how our universe operates are actually incorrect. I find I have been living an illusion. I realize I travel around the sun, not the sun travels around me.

Every conflict I’ve ever known is filled with such overly complex calculations, false paradigms, negative beliefs that in the end are discovered to hardly have substance at all. If my work fails it’s because those in conflict maintain their place and status — and their stories about one another — not risking the true journey but instead agreeing to disagree.

1. Describe one act of courageous leadership you initiated within the last two years.
2. How did this act work out for you?
3. Describe one act of courageous leadership you avoided or hesitated to initiate in the last two years?
4. How did the situation work out for you?
5. Whether you took action, avoided it or hesitated, how do these choices reflect your own private view of yourself?
6. How have these choices and what has happened as a result  influenced your current willingness to exercise your leadership?
7. What else would it be helpful to know about you and situations you faced?
8. In general, how well are you surviving and thriving in these challenging times?

There is no special definition of leader or courage that we are using.  If you consider yourself a leader formally or informally and consider your actions courageous (or not) please feel free to respond.

We will hold your survey responses entirely confidential unless you tell us otherwise.  Any reporting we do of the results will be anonymized and no specific stories, incidents or other trackable information will ever be disclosed without your explicit permission.

If you would be interested in talking with us further, would like to be interviewed instead of completing the survey or would like to receive a later report about what we learn, please give us a way to get hold of you.

Thank you so much!

Please forward your email to:

dan@danieloestreich.com and/or moreenbranham@gmail.com

Who we are:

Dan Oestreich is the principal of Oestreich Associates, a national leadership coaching and consulting practice located in the Seattle area. For the last 30 years, he has worked creatively with leaders to help them hear feedback that will improve trust levels and systems performance, and facilitate the work of building strong workplace communities. He is known as an effective, articulate coach, able to sensitively help clients find their own best path of change and personal growth. He is the author of two well-known books on speaking up at work, Driving Fear Out of the Workplace and The Courageous Messenger. For ten years he led Beyond the Edge, a personal and professional leadership growth workshop in Jackson, Wyoming. Dan’s clients include healthcare systems, universities, services, governments, manufacturers and non-profit agencies.  Website: https://danieloestreich.com

Dan received his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and a Master of Arts in Guidance and Counseling from the University of Colorado at Boulder.  

Moreen Branham brings more than 30 years of experience developing leaders at all levels, most recently as Director of Clinical Operations and Vice President and Chief People Officer for Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA). Compassion, courage, and authenticity are cornerstones of her work. Her experience as a licensed social worker and at SCCA equipped Moreen with a deep understanding of what it takes to support others through difficult transitions, whether it’s supporting patients and families through trauma, loss and grief, or guiding leaders in learning to trust themselves and grow through difficult times. Moreen now makes her home in Sedona, Arizona, and continues to consult on leadership development.

Moreen received a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, a Master of Social Work, and an Executive Master of Business Administration from the University of Washington.

The first is based on the desire for personal agency — a topic I’ve addressed recently (and at many times) on this blog; the second is growth based on transcendence.

Examples of personal agency include:

• Initiating a tough conversation with a colleague, especially one that includes setting boundaries.
• A request for feedback about a known blind spot.
• Wading into a team conflict where there will likely be winners and losers.
• Standing up for an unpopular viewpoint for the good of the organization.

These are all instances of initiative that may involve interpersonal risk and if there’s been a pattern of avoiding risk (and let’s just say there has been), the way forward then necessarily involves personal growth. The motivating energy must overcome past conditioning, self-imposed limits and bad beliefs. To get free requires the push of a rocket’s engines against the strength of gravity. It takes the powerful thrust of personal agency to achieve orbit.

Examples of the second energy, transcendence, are:

• Recognizing that past excessive and typical brooding about a particular problem is unwarranted and does not deserve the feelings (of anxiety, guilt, anger, depression, etc.) given to it.
• Finding that a serious background dilemma (such as, should I go or should I stay?) seems to dissolve rather than resolve without doing anything significant to “fix” the situation.
• Beginning to sense the real reasons behind a conflict, leading to a creative solution that seems to automatically present itself. Tension evaporates.
• Suddenly not worrying about the high stakes nature of a key transaction — surrendering to simply doing one’s best rather than a pattern of perfectionistic over-preparation.

This is more the energy of a hot air balloon helping rise above — and out of — the difficulty. This is the growth of being lifted up. As energies go, it often involves a sense of coming to something a little unexpectedly, even counter-intuitively, but also potentially a sign, a synchronicity or a gift. I may say to myself, “how did I ever look at things the way I used to!”

My sense is many instances of genuine personal growth contain elements of each — some push, some lift. We are required to use our agency — not just wait for the universe or somebody else for answers — and yet to also be awake and available to what the universe and others may bring. It isn’t all one way or another; it’s a combination of energies that in some way are integral to our identities.

This maybe is one reason why we especially admire those who are able to effect personal change. Our admiration may reflect back to us all the places in ourselves where we implicitly know a push will be required along with the right proportion of trust.

We have to apply the full dynamic of our personal agency to the effort because we know we can’t just make transcendence happen. It happens when it happens. In the meantime, what we can always do is be open, live our part of cause and effect while living a little ways beyond it, a personal combination, our unique recipe for the right stuff. There’s something to be said for action and initiation, but also for patience, for the experience of listening for what is new, vulnerable, possible and believing it’s there for us.

It’s okay to be a little lost now and again in the wilderness — if we are lucky, with the bright stars streaming overhead as our whole heart comes with us to sit still at the edge of the cosmos. The sparks of a fire float higher into the darkness, mingling with stars.

Somewhere in the distance there’s the drone of a didgeridoo.

Link to Full Workshop Information

If you are saying to yourself, but that’s all we do is work is on adaptive challenges, I certainly wouldn’t argue. The throes of rapid change are upon us more than ever.

My concern in this post, however, is not so much about the acceleration of organizational change as what is happening for the individual leaders who are immersed in the changes.

Some Typical Challenges

Consider Mel (short for Melody) who is part of a Finance team caught in those “throes.”

• She and her team have been trying to shift to a new cloud-based financial management system but the whole process has become confused, slowed to a snail’s pace with inadequate training and poor decision-making.
• In theory this whole change is part of a greater effort to add “business intelligence” functions to her work unit, a term that has gone largely undefined and seems to mean she and her team are responsible for putting together reports she’s never been asked for in the past, causing her to wonder if they are really needed.
• There’s also a class and pay study afoot and her staff are generally upset because positions have been underpaid for years.
• She’s been told she will need to reorganize but she worries this will be little more than moving deck chairs on the Titanic.
• The workload for Mel and her reports feels unrealistic, overwhelming and depressing. She feels she is coping in a system where she isn’t invited to key meetings with those making decisions about her own and her team’s work and she cannot realistically say no to anything assigned. She operates without any clear sense of priority — it’s all important.
• Her boss is sympathetic but can’t seem to provide solutions or specific guidance. “It is what it is,” he says, “Do your best” –phrases she’s come to privately detest.
• HR, unhelpfully, can only suggest that she take classes in time management and resilience and seems generally impenetrable to any other feedback, such as about leader behavior upstream or the actual systemic and cultural conditions that define this workplace.

This isn’t just organizational messiness. This is a personal situation for a leader caught in the erratic, feels-like-failure middle of things.

Stay or Go?

For her part, Mel doesn’t feel she even has time to stop and take stock. The irony is that although she is generally regarded as one of a few leaders likely to grow in the organization — someone nobody wants to lose — she is privately wondering what, if anything, she should do about her situation. Should she stay, try to fight through the chaos and pressure causing her to regularly work 60–80 hours a week, potentially wrecking her homelife, parenting and marriage, or should she give up and try to start over somewhere else?

This is the personal side of adaptive leadership, one I think organizations increasingly expect leaders — especially those in the middle — to master on their own.

Heifetz and Laurie suggest that leaders try to “get on the balcony” of their organization in order to see the whole pattern without getting swept up in the field of action, and this strikes me as excellent advice, but for individual leaders who feel they have little personal agency to change their situation this advice often rings hollow unless they adopt a radically new stance. To quote the poet Mary Oliver and her poem, “The Journey,” their own personal balcony is the place to go “to save the only life that you could save” — which is your own.

And, indeed, that effort may begin with carving out some quiet, reflective space to rest and renew long enough to invite new thinking and feeling. The first act is to create a personal balcony that is quiet enough to listen to the deeper messages of self and soul, a place to genuinely introspect and to sort out the pain and begin determining how much personal agency, in fact, is needed and of what kind.

Why Is This So Tough?

Committed, responsible people are often exceptionally good at volunteering, doing more, being good team players, along the way violating their own rules for what constitutes a reasonable approach to their work; then wondering why they are burning out while trying harder and harder to do the right and necessary thing. By the time they do the carving out, they may already be so exhausted the only question is “How much longer have I got here?” At this point, we may well have missed signs along the way — points at which our agency has been given away and where the only recourse seems to be to blame ourselves or the organization for the situation.

In part this blame dynamic may well represent a symptom of a larger problem, which is a failure of what I would call “reflective leadership,” the failure of deeper, more comprehensive personal introspection — which means taking the time needed to create and honor the view from the balcony of one’s life, to more than ever think for oneself and take action.

It is all too easy for the frog to boil in the gradually heating waters of job, career progression, implicit promises organizations might have made or that we simply hoped for and think we heard. The loss of personal agency is a hidden epidemic as we try to get ahead, as we learn more and more not to lead our lives and workplaces with personal courage but to follow the hope of one day being able to lead in the roles we want — the possible, if precarious future reward for good employees. Perhaps too much time has gone by so that it may be hard even to articulate what we do really want, and this is the sad part, the loss of the thinking, soulful part of ourselves. Shame on us for taking the bait.

Facing the Adaptive Personal Challenge

To be sure this does not mean that people inevitably up and leave their jobs when they get too strenuous. To the contrary, it points to the fact of facing an adaptive personal challenge, one that can be addressed best by:

• Thinking more deeply than ever for yourself and with other people, not hoping for upstream leadership to solve the problem.
• Asserting yourself in new ways to make a seat at the table
• Building connections and offering solutions that require constructive conflict and collaboration.
• Activating potentials and dreams you may not know you have.
• Stepping across the line of attractive passivity to trust yourself and forgive yourself for the inevitable missteps along the way.

All of these things mean risking discomfort, facing up to that discomfort with a little humility and an acknowledgement that the way of modern leadership is not safe, but can be, must be for you, actively meaningful and fulfilling.

So What Could Mel Do?

Mel could carve out the time she needs — an hour, a day, ten days — devoted to creating the balcony from which to view her work and her life. The very fact that she may feel that she shouldn’t or can’t take that time is a blinking red light that that is exactly what she needs to do.

It is likely that the effort to stand on the balcony will initially feel frustrating. Mel needs to hold her ground and wait through the time of feeling overwhelmed. If it helps, journal. If it helps, go for a run (or many runs). If it helps, sleep. Until her heart and soul comes back to her. Then she will need to begin to build an plan that draws on her deepest needs, desires for happiness and capabilities, capabilities she might not even be sure she’s got.

For example, she might begin by having a much better, deeper conversation with her boss, a heart-to-heart about the lived realities of her job and where she needs immediate and ongoing help.

She might create a support group of people inside or outside her organization; not for simply complaining, but for realistic guidance and the offering of truthful feedback, a community to constructively aid her in her growth as a leader.

She can ask for a seat at the table. Even a temporary one might help. In essence, she might begin to build deeper relationships with peers and other leaders within her organization, beginning to share her vision of what needs to be corrected and how it can happen — related to all the things that are under her skin: the new financial management system; the pressure to reorganize, the full meaning of “business intelligence.”

She might need to have deeper conversations with her spouse about what this time in her life means and how they together can face the challenges ahead. She might begin to set better boundaries at work so that she can also feel she’s fulfilling her role as a parent.

In short, Mel needs to take more control of her life. She needs to reclaim her agency as a human being. And to do that, she may also need to go deeply into herself to confront and begin to change the conditioning (the old rules about what it means to be a “good employee,” for instance) that contributed to her emotional and psychic overload in the first place. This may be the toughest but most rewarding task of all. This is more than meditation and self-compassion. It is the unearthing of the whole story about “How I got here” and “My own private view of myself.”

These are not easy tasks, and none of these sample actions alone is a full answer. This is not easy work with simple formulas that guarantee success. This work can require reflective leadership at very deep levels — as a radical, personal act of both centered self-knowledge and organizational care.

If you find yourself needing more personal time on the balcony and want to claim (or reclaim) more of your personal agency, please consider leadership coaching or the following dedicated workshop: