CONFESSIONS OF A CORPORATE SHAMAN. Harrison Snow
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I checked into the conference center after a long drive. I must have given the desk clerk the impression I could not do anything right either. Scattered and disorganized, I rummaged around for my passport and credit card and then went through the same routine again as I tried to exchange some dollars for the local currency.
Reviewing the agenda that night I wondered how anything productive could come of the meeting if both the facilitator and the group were gripped by this scattered incompetence. Failure seemed inevitable. Were these dark feelings and thoughts connected to something in my past? I remembered years earlier, as a new lieutenant in the military, how overwhelmed and underprepared I felt. As a novice leader I made plenty of mistakes, eventually gaining the confidence and leadership skills needed to be effective. In my own family I was sure my father and grandfathers had similar moments of self-doubt and setbacks. Even though they were all deceased, silently I asked for their blessings.
Thinking about the people who would be attending the retreat, clearly I was no better or worse than them. We were all in this together and if we shared a problem we also shared the solution. As I went through these inner acknowledgments and movements, the nagging “sense of gloom caused by an impending sense of doom” started to ease. My mood lightened and a restful night followed. The next morning I felt ready to face a hundred or so disorganized participants.
Surprisingly, instead of chaos the group exhibited a fair degree of coherence and order. During our discussions and activities, themes emerged that were positive and solution focused. Reconnecting with my own sense of competence seemed to hold the space for the group to reconnect with theirs. This parallel process of working with your client by working first with yourself suggests a subtle link between personal and group effectiveness. To be effective at the organizational level, it is best to stay one step ahead on the personal level. Rapid results by the group depend to some extent on rapid learning through self-inquiry by the facilitator or leader.
Emotional Hijacking and the Self
All of us have had one of these moments. A certain person says something or acts in a particular way and it triggers a strong reaction in you. When one of your “hot buttons” gets pushed you have less access to your emotional and intellectual resources. You’ve “lost your wisdom” as people say in the Middle East. Physiologically, the frontal cortex has shut down and the amygdala—the abode of fight, flight, or freeze in the limbic system—takes over. When we’re in physical danger, the hijacking by the amygdala might be appropriate and even life-saving. But in most social or business situations, losing one’s composure means doing or saying things that cause regret. To respond optimally you need to access all your inner resources. A popular saying in the therapeutic professions is that a person is never upset for the reason she thinks she is. For the use of self to work, it is essential that you know your emotional hot buttons and how to manage them. Letting a hot button dictate your reaction when you are facilitating or leading others can’t help but lead to a regrettable outcome. If you can calm yourself during a stressful situation then you can calm and reassure others. The part within that needs calming is often wounded or insecure. The more intense its reaction to a situation, the bigger the trauma that is behind the reaction. Knowing the situations or behaviors that trigger those parts of yourself will help you deal with them.
Byron Katie is a facilitator who focuses on personal change by helping people question their habitual thoughts and beliefs. Her method, referred to simply as “The Work,” offers a way to stay centered while dealing with adversity.2 Strong emotions often spring from hasty judgments about another person’s behavior. Those judgments are based on assumptions about what the offending behavior means that are rooted in a past experience. If you decide that the story you tell yourself about those assumptions is not true and you drop it, what changes for you? What shifts when you stop arguing with reality and “agree to what is”?
Agree to What Is
There are two parts to “agreeing to what is.” The first is forming a clear picture of the reality being addressed. Acknowledging objectively “what is,” no matter how we are reacting to it, subjectively provides us with inner space to take the next step. That second step is about not resisting or arguing with reality. People often go through a process of denial, anger, bargaining, and grief before they can come to terms with something they find unacceptable. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote extensively on this emotional sequence as it related to the stages of grief.3 Unlike the passivity of being resigned, these two inner steps are strengthening. More inner resources are freed up and available to deal with the challenges you face.
Maintaining Your Objectivity
Many consultants believe their effectiveness depends on being careful not to merge with the client system. An outsider sees things an insider might miss or be reluctant to point out. A healthy separation allows you, the observer, to observe in an objective manner. The client’s issues and dysfunctions may seem unrelated, but if you look deeply enough into your own psyche or family history you may find places of resonance and relatedness. Blindly projecting your own issues and insecurities onto your client’s is more likely to occur when your subjectivity is not managed properly. Noticing when tendencies are triggered, but not being swayed by them, is the skillful use of self.
Putting space between you and your reactive parts that judge or withdraw enables you to use them as data. Viewing these data as part of your organizational assessment depersonalizes the situation and defuses the potential for a damaging conflict. If we don’t resist, collapse, or counterattack then we can inquire and use what we learn in a professional manner.
Waiting for Enlightenment
How you respond to difficult circumstances and challenging personalities is the litmus test for leadership. That said, you don’t have to wait for enlightenment to be an effective leader or facilitator. Overcoming the mind-based defenses against self-awareness enables you to lead others through their denials and blind spots. Brain researchers like Daniel Siegel, professor of clinical psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, are discovering how neuropathways formed in childhood dictate patterns of perception and response that are not based in present time.4
The human brain is malleable and, according to Siegel, keeps developing even after childhood. He argues that the mind is not an output of the brain alone; it matters, but so do our social relationships and experiences. “The mind is embodied not just enskulled.”5 A mind hardwired to produce a dysfunctional, reactionary pattern can replace that pattern with one that is more functional. Observing your emotions, assumptions, and beliefs and challenging them disrupts those automatic reactions. The hard part is having enough self-witnessing to question the meaning your mind automatically assigns to events. Transcending the neurological and mental grip of the past activates a higher level of cognition. Siegel calls this level of cognition “mindful awareness.” You perceive in the moment without the distortions of judgments and interpretations.
According to Siegel, the state of mindful awareness supports the attributes of curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love. The small mind, with its fearful survival-mode reactions, is replaced by a consciousness that is connected to a more universal intelligence and knowing.6
How do you replace the biased interpretations of your reactionary mind with mindful awareness? The explanations the mind excels at will inevitably get in the way. Meditation, mindfulness exercises, journaling, personal coaching, and the practices and methods described in this book are some of the means that develop mindful awareness. Constellations bypass the mind’s defenses and reveal the hidden emotions and beliefs underlying its bias. Observing yourself rewires the neural pathways that support functional behavior. This awareness is like keeping a window open on your personal computer that is not running any applications. You see from that place what is going on without becoming identified with it. That inner space enables more freedom of choice.
Neither the other-focused nor the self-centered person has a healthy sense of self.