I Belong Here

In a recent session with a client of mine, I was asking her about her goals for the New Year. A lot of people I have asked about this have been rather complacent about it, as if this human-made construct of the threshold of December 31st and January 1st has some magic fairy dust in it. Somehow at the changeover our lives will have a different meaning and purpose and our goals and visions will finally be realized. My client was revealing a few things that she wants to do this year and she seemed more stalwart than usual. She had some experiences lately that have her become more awake, more in her own power, more ready to assert herself in the world. Then she said something that struck me as powerful. When I asked her about this new found sense of power, she calmly said “I belong here”.

Those three words are very powerful indeed and I have contemplated them. To me, they don’t just mean to belong in a physical location, in space and time. They to me speak of a confidence of owning yourself more fully on multiple levels of your existence. You can belong more fully in your marriage, in your body, in your career, in your hobbies, in your visions and goals. There are so many possibilities of how belonging can manifest in your life.

It makes me think of Maslow. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is very well known. It is a model that is explicit about how our basic needs build on a foundation for belonging, which in turn forms a foundation for self-actualization, that is to realize and fulfill our purpose as human beings. If you are constantly trying to survive physically and emotionally then you never really get to the belonging stage, that stage that you feel like you belong to a group of supportive people on your path. This belonging then gives us the springboard to look at our purpose and what mission we want to fulfill in life. This is a general gloss-over but you get the point.

So I ask you, what is getting in your way of belonging here? Where are those areas that you are perpetually stuck? Maybe it is speaking your truth to others, being a pleaser. Maybe your body isn’t as strong as it could be. Maybe there are relationships in your life that need work. Maybe your career needs an overhaul. For me the turn of the year is a good benchmark, a useful guide on our journey through time to stop and reflect. Reflection can be very powerful and bring insights to those areas that need improvement. And then yes, there is apathy, the “I have tried in the past but it didn’t work out” mentality. If you don’t know your hang-ups, then you can’t move past them. I have seen many people along the spectrum of ages change and improve upon their darker places.

For myself, I feel most of the time that I belong here. I work hard on many areas of my life, which incidentally I have set goals for. I have physical, mental/emotional, business, and relationship goals. I want to resist inertia and stagnation, a moving target is hard to hit. I seek to walk the talk, to show others that I am congruent with my message. I seek to be as positive as possible and frame things as things to be accepted or figured out, instead of problems and woes. I seek not feed the victim, the poor me in my own experience and seek to slay that mentality in others. The victim has no power to belong here. Let us all rise above our fears and anxieties and paint a picture of a new day, a new possibility. Start small. Pick one thing and begin to see it through. Use it as a case study, a test for putting down the yoke once and for all and moving in the direction of your destiny.

Skip the Side of Holiday Drama

As most of us know and feel, the hectic pace of the holidays can put us to the test emotionally, mentally, and physically. With so much to do and so little time, overwhelm and anxiety can be real reactions we have to these stressors of fitting it all in. Maybe your are going to roll smoothly through the holidays with no stress, I say good for you! This is the ideal and you should bottle your secret recipe up and share it with others. For the rest of us however, we have the opportunity to slow down a little bit to keep ourselves intact. And then there is family. Family is a special time for a lot of people, connecting with those loved ones that we don’t necessarily see a lot in our lives. Bringing everyone under one roof for a day or few hours can be both exciting and challenging for some people.

There are those family members that rub you the wrong way, that you have negative history with, that challenge your well-being. I have written about drama in a past post, but the way I define it is as ‘unresolved emotional tension’. We don’t like to see ourselves or admit that we have drama in our lives sometimes, because that’s a less-than-ideal thought about ourselves. But it’s true. We go into our family holiday with judgment, apathy, sarcasm, avoidance and other attitudes and behaviors. And maybe you don’t, but others surely do and that can be a challenge for anyone to field. In the midst of your family members you know what triggers you, or at least you can. By thinking ahead about that certain uncle that is loud or that sibling who talks endlessly about themselves, you can understand what reaction you might have and then prepare yourself to keep yourself more emotionally intact this time. If you tend to react to some of these behaviors you get to ask yourself if you want to do this or not. If you do, then you do. If you don’t then what else can you do instead of react?

People are free to be who they are. But for those special family members that irk you, there is a judgment that they should be different. And maybe they should. But they are not. They are who they are. The deeper question to ask is why things bother you in the first place? What is it about other’s behaviors that leave you depleted, emotionally drained? I don’t have an easy answer for this, but what I do know is that the high art of self-awareness and self-management is to understand your own triggers and why they are there. What are the triggers showing you about yourself? There is a saying that posits, “If it bothers you, it’s your problem”. I tend to agree.

On the other hand, if that sibling who gets drunk and starts acting rowdy perturbs you, maybe they need to know how it impacts you and potentially others. This doesn’t have to come out of trigger though, but out of a respectful message to uphold your boundaries. Feedback is a special gift we can give others, but they also need to be willing to listen.

So in your holiday travels this year, just like skipping that extra sugary treat for your physical health, see if you can skip that side of emotional drama. Your reactions and judgments make for a not-so-good feeling inside. This is something that can be controlled, that you can control. Others’ behaviors are their own deal, borne from their own pain, drama and history, they are not personal to you. So don’t take it personally. Rise above the cloud of negative behaviors and take the high road, not out of superiority and separation, but out of love and compassion for yourself and others. A side of emotional tranquility will taste particularly good.

How Emotional Triggers Work

In my work recently I have noticed a more comprehensive way (in my mind at least) as to how triggers work. There are many reasons why we get emotional upset, but I will give you a scenario that seeks to encapsulate my understanding. Remember, triggers are not just the hot emotions: Frustration, anger, rage. They also encompass anxiety, worry, fear, sadness, depression. Any of those so-called ‘negative’ emotions are what I coach around in organizations because they can cause a lot of havoc when not managed well.

The scenario is a case of negative intention meets negative impact. Let’s say person A is doing something that royally pisses person B off. So Person B is getting emotionally upset and instead of addressing this issue in a positive way he uses sarcasm (negative intention) to deal with it; he launches a sarcastic comment when under duress to person A. Person A then gets upset by the sarcasm (negative impact) and then gives person B a dirty look, then issues a sarcastic comment of her own and then walks away (another negative intention followed potentially by another negative impact!). Each person feels justified for launching a negative behavior because they think the other one has pissed them off. They are both partially right. Person B is indeed having a reaction to something person A is doing, this is true because it would follow that person B wants person A to stop doing that thing or do something different. So person B’s initial trigger wasn’t managed well and he dropped sarcasm, which has not helped the situation, in fact it has escalated it. Person A got hooked by the sarcasm, got triggered by it and launched some negativity of her own, thinking person B was to blame for how she was feeling. This is understandable because negative energy has to go somewhere. We feel justified to take the negative action because it seems like it will work. And even though we feel justified by the negative behavior because it releases our negative energy, it doesn’t lead to a positive outcome and thus a good relationship or morale, which is actually what most people want.

An old colleague of mine used to ask “Do you want to be happy or do you want to be right?” You can launch a sarcastic comment thinking that you are right (and maybe you are), but this leads to unhappiness. So if you want unhappiness in others, then you are fee to keep being sarcastic. I posit too that launching sarcasm might make you feel right, but it doesn’t have you feeling happy because ultimately you have transgressed your values of being a kind, supportive, loving person. If you actually care about other people, which I have found to be 99% true, then maybe some happiness would be a better course of action. So here is the same scenario managed a lot better:

Persona A is inadvertently doing something that has person B emotionally upset. Person B knows he is triggered, and wants to be sarcastic. He stops himself though from launching a diatribe to person A. He calms himself down knowing that taking an action from a triggered place probably won’t be the best course of action. So he shuts his door and takes a few minutes to take some deep breaths. When he calms down he asks himself what he really wants from person A, what his desires or needs are. He then thinks about how to approach person A as respectfully as he can to address the situation. He realizes that avoiding the issue is just as negative for himself as sarcasm because change won’t happen, and he really wants something to change. So, he puts his feelings and desires into a feedback statement and musters up the courage to take the risk to deliver it to person A. He does this in a conducive setting and thinks about feedback as a constructive tool. He thinks about it as a gift. He is looking for a win/win. He delivers the feedback and person A graciously takes the feedback and a good dialogue ensues. Person A hadn’t realized the negative impact she was having on person B and she commits to changing something about her behavior that was irking person B. She does this not out of obligation or pressure, but because of the value of the information person B gave her and the value of the relationship.

These two scenarios are in direct contrast to each other. The first one happens all the time in organizations, and in relationships in general. It may not be sarcasm, but it could be stonewalling, yelling, aggression, lying, etc. As I said before, triggers have their own logic. The negative energy needs a conduit, a pathway to get resolution to itself. However, the negative energy has the seed of change in it, but it gets obscured because we don’t like these kinds of feelings, so we react to them. This reaction is where the rubber hits the road in my work. This is where we need to take 100% responsibility for what we are feeling and then what we do with those feelings. By being self-aware, we can calm down enough to think about the seed of change and then give that seed some sun. Most times others will see this seed and want to let it grow too.

The Second Biggest Lie of All Time

In my work with leaders and teams, the first thing I address is emotional triggers. We all feel negative feelings from time to time, especially when we work with other human beings. Differences in personality, style, role, position, status, etc. can play a part in why we get emotionally upset by others. This is natural. Through self-awareness of what triggers you and why, you can begin to evoke different strategies to deal more effectively with them, thus becoming more of a master of your energy and a constructive force in the workplace. In pondering my work with others (and with myself as I am constantly practicing as well) I realize it is a possibility to fall into the blame game. When we blame others we feel a little bit better because “they made me feel upset”. In my estimation however, this is the second biggest hoax of all time. If I ask you to raise your hand, and you do it, does that mean that I made you do it? No. I simply asked and you cooperated. You could easily have said no. When others do things that are not ideal for you, are they making you feel a certain way? Or are you reacting to something that has happened? There is a difference. In the first scenario you are at the whim of others’ actions and feel as if the reaction you have is out of your control. You, in essence become a victim of circumstance. In the second scene you realize that you are having a reaction, and you own it fully. The situation may still not be ideal but there is a self-awareness that for some reason you are having a reaction. This is a more powerful position. When you hear yourself saying either out loud or to yourself that someone is making you feel a certain way, this is the time to stop the lie. The jig is up. You are still feeling what you feel, but there is more creative potential in owning your reaction. Unfortunately, patterns of triggers and reactions develop over time and have solid roots. By beginning to own more our reactions, such as “I am feeling this in relation to that” instead of “she is making me feel this way” you can start to cut the roots away. By understanding that you are responsible for your well-being you can start to ask yourself why this person or situation upsets you and what would be ideal in the future. Sometimes others remind us of the unwanted aspects of ourselves, what psychology calls our shadow. This has nothing to do with the other person, and everything to do with the unresolved emotional energy and beliefs locked inside. Secondly, you can begin to envision what you really want in a situation and use skillfulness in communication to potentially get your needs or vision met. But don’t take my word for it, test this theory out. The next time you feel an adverse emotion in a situation with another person, say to yourself “I am feeling this in relation to that. Why does it bother me so much? What’s the learning here? Who do they remind me of? What do I want to happen in the future?” These question will help you release the victim and look to a more generative and creative position. This can be a truly powerful stance. Oh, and the first biggest lie of all time? That you shouldn’t lie. I will explore this next time.

The Anatomy of Organizational Culture Change: A Small Toolbox for Big Change

As most business leaders and managers know, organization culture is real, yet it is hard to put a finger on exactly what it is, and thus how to engender it in the workplace day to day. It has always been my premise that culture happens whether we are intentional about it or not, so why not be strategic about the practices that set the conditions for a positive, collaborative and innovative culture? In past articles I have exposed the various skills and practices that are paramount to developing a strong and vibrant culture. In this article I will put them all together in a top level view so you can see the trajectory and method that I use in my work, what I call the anatomy of organizational culture change.

I view progress as both linear and concurrent. The linear piece means that my main concepts are broken out and discussed week after week, one after another. The concurrent piece is that even though I parse the skills out, they all work together, in tandem, like pieces of cloth working together to make a quilt. In the beginning you need to work on each square of fabric. We begin week after week to sew the concepts and skills together to make a portion of a quilt in real time. But when they are put together they make something very useful, a whole that is a sum of its parts. In my estimation, it even goes beyond the sum of the parts, because when all of the pieces of culture change are working together, they forge an energy that taps into the collective wisdom of the group. The group itself becomes more intelligent because of each person’s commitment and practice of the attitudes and skills that make a culture highly functional. The World Famous Pike Place Fish Market is a great example of a real-time illustration of this concept.

The skills can be taught one-on-one or with a group, or both. You need to figure out the frequency of meetings that you can have and make a commitment to see them through. In the age of busy-ness, it’s my view that we need to resist being in the weeds and spend some time together learning and thinking strategically about how a team or group can function better, more optimally. So let’s say you decide on weekly or bi-weekly meetings, this method will fit into any time period, although I like to not go longer than monthly just for memory sake. Each meeting will then have an agenda, which includes a new concept or skill (content piece). Each agenda will begin with a check-in to how the past concept has been implemented. I also build in time in every agenda for appreciation (specific articulated ways we positively impact each other) and relationship building (getting to know each other as humans beyond roles) because they are the practices that engender trust, the glue that binds our commitment to each other to stay the course. So in a nutshell each agenda has a check-in, appreciations, relationship building, a new content piece or two, and then a closing question (such as “what are you taking away from today’s meeting?).

The first content piece to focus on is trigger management. When people work together there is propensity for negativity and dysfunction for a variety of reasons. We need to help people understand their ‘negative’ emotions and learn how to manage them more effectively for the result they are trying to achieve. This is not a case of just thinking positively. It validates that negative times happen, and one of our strategies for dealing with our negativity is to perpetuate negativity into the culture. This is understandable because energy has to go somewhere, but it can lead to poison all around. I call these reactions ‘negative team behaviors’, and they don’t actually solve the problem. It may feel good to give someone a dose of negativity, and you may even feel justified or vindicated for it, but it rarely leads to high morale and sustained change.

The next component I move into is feedback skills. The second meeting will be devoted to giving feedback and the third about receiving feedback and defensiveness that can happen. Feedback is the premier communication tool for collaboration and innovation in a business. I teach what feedback is, why it’s important and then how to do it. I offer a roadmap to give people a template to plug their own unique situations in to take some of the mystique out of how to do it. Of course intention is paramount to feedback. I talk about our intention to care about our fellow employee’s (or manager, owner) success and growth. 99% of the people that I have worked with have reported caring about each other, even if there is a struggle happening. This is important to remember and belies my perspective that feedback is a gift. We get to deliver it to build someone up rather than tear down, and we get to receive it well, hearing the nuggets of our growth and not taking it personally.

In the fourth session I bring awareness to intention and impact. I use a matrix to illuminate the different possibilities of positive and negative intention which could lead to positive and negative impacts. We are always impacting people, hopefully for the positive. When challenges happen in the workplace sometimes there is a mismatch between positive intention and negative impact. One example could be honestly wanting to give someone feedback to help them grow, and the person taking offense to it and taking it personally.

In the fifth session I explore listening skills, namely body language, paraphrasing and our ability to be curious and ask questions. True listening means that we are not of two minds, such as when we are multi-tasking or distracted. It is a gift to give someone our un-abided attention. It feels good and the other person feels valued. I also talk about upholding boundaries when you truly can’t take the time to listen. Saying something like “can you come back in 15 minutes so I can finish this report?” is much better than continuing typing, saying ‘uh-huh’, only getting snippets of information and being somewhat tuned out.

The last three sessions are devoted to team building exercises and concepts. I rarely start off my work with teams with team building games/exercises, because a team needs to learn the aforementioned skills and get some traction with practice so they can communicate better and feel more like a team. Then team building activities help them to have fun and integrate the skills in a tactile way. Some exercises I use are build-a-word, toxic waste dump, synergy, puzzling puzzles, helium stick and back-to-back drawing game. You can Google these or contact me for more information.

So that’s it in a nutshell. I use specific worksheets and models for most of the content pieces, which I can share in a different post. Just remember that someone needs to champion this work. It could be an owner, another executive, a manager or a coach. Whoever takes up the torch of building a positive culture needs to make sure to be diligent and stay the course. This approach will take time, but the payoffs can be amazing for the people and the business success.

Taking Things Personally

We all experience adverse emotions from time to time, some more than others. Sometimes when others present us information that we don’t want to hear, such as feedback for our attitude or performance, we take it personally. What does it mean to take something personally? To me, whenever we feel offended, embarrassed, insulted, defensive or upset there is a reason behind the scenes that is motivating these emotions. Say, for instance your co-worker gives you some feedback about a process that you are following that isn’t quite right. When this person comes to you and delivers the feedback, you may feel ‘less than’ or even ‘the worst employee ever’. Now the co-worker didn’t say these words at all, they merely gave you some constructive pushback. You in essence have taken the feedback personally, instead of what it was intended to do. We all sit with negative feelings about ourselves at times, most likely based on unresolved experiences from our past conditioning personally and culturally. There are many ideals and expectations that are placed on us growing up, many we couldn’t live up to. Also, some parents and teachers were not so nice at times and created within us our own ideal of how we should be. We take these ideals into adulthood and they become unconsciously part of our identity.

We all sit with negative feelings about ourselves at times, most likely based on unresolved experiences from our past conditioning personally and culturally.

One client I support had a stepfather who reinforced over time that her voice didn’t matter, to be quiet because that is what good girls do. You can imagine that this energy is still alive as an adult, creating part of her identity. In short, her unresolved identity from childhood is still alive and well. So when some situations occur to have her speak her mind and truth, say to her male supervisor, she clams up. Or when she perceives that someone isn’t valuing her perspective, she takes it personally because that is what dad did. I want to posit that even when people do have a negative intention to insult us, for instance, we don’t have to take anything personally. If you get upset by someone’s insult, that has nothing to do with the other person. In my opinion you are making a choice to get upset because of what the insult reminds you of, your unresolved identity. Most of us don’t look at this subterranean level of our experience, instead we fight against the surface, the other person, and blame them for our distressed emotions. This simply is the biggest hoax of all time. I personally grew up with a stepfather that was hard to deal with; he was ornery and condescending at times. I moved into my 20’s with a ‘chip on my shoulder’, an identity that I was less than to some degree. I felt depressed about it many times, but didn’t realize what was motivating it. I am fortunate to have gotten into coaching so I could understand this part of me more fully so it doesn’t drive my behavior as much.

Not too long ago, a man I was doing some team building with got very upset and raised his voice to me in front of the whole group. I could have taken this personally and fought back. But I understood in that moment that he was reminding me of my stepfather and that I wanted to fight back. But he isn’t my stepfather. In that moment I was able to calm my impulse to fight against my (unresolved) stepfather and just be curious as to this other person’s unease. I didn’t have to take it personally and I didn’t. It was a defining moment of my coaching career and humanity. So any time that you feel less then, worthless, bad, unlovable, etc., take stock in these moments. They are stemming from something you haven’t dealt with yet. What you can do is just calm yourself down and realize that these thoughts and feelings are fleeting and stem from old stuff. If someone is being abusive or rude, you can ask or demand them to stop, but it doesn’t have to stem from taking it personally, rather it can stem from your values of connection and love. With the employee who was raising his voice at me, at some point I asked him if he could calm down a little bit so we could talk it through because yelling wasn’t going to get him very far. I was able to calm him down gently and glean some really good feedback from him, as well as engender self-awareness on his part. Why did he get triggered by me and yell? He took something I did personally. Even though my intention was to have a good team building experience he had a reaction that had little to do with me and a lot to do with his own unresolved issues that I was triggering up in that moment.

There is great power in choosing your reactions and attitude. You can rise above your past and create a different present, and thus future.

What is going on here? Why are you reacting to a situation in that way? Does this remind you of anything of old? What thoughts and emotions are present? Enlist someone you trust to talk these instances through and you may be surprised what you find.