The Buoyant Leader

Do you have a dreaded conversation in your future?

By “dreaded conversation,” I’m talking about one that you’ve been procrastinating because you don’t want to experience it. 

Maybe you’re worried about making them feel bad by telling them some not-so-nice things.

Maybe you’re worried about getting frustrated and losing your cool.

Maybe you’re worried about saying the wrong thing and making the situation or relationship worse.

And yet, you know that putting off the conversation until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow isn’t going to help. 

The issue isn’t going to resolve itself. 

It might even fester and get worse.

And you might become more and more upset and resentful, until you explode in a flurry of highly unskilled (read "apeshit crazy") speech that might destroy the relationship.

When I coach or train people to have what they think of as “dreaded conversations,” what they’re mostly looking for is techniques.

Basically, they want me to tell them what to say. The magic words that will compel the other person to listen, agree, and change.

They want to know things like:

• What's the best way to start?
• What do I say to disarm their defensiveness?
• What words do I utter to convince them that they need to change?

I get it.

When I’m at a loss, I also just want someone to tell me exactly what to do.

I don't want a deep dive into underlying principles, just a set of instructions I can follow.

Instructions can be helpful — in certain situations. When things are static, memorizing and mastering technique may be all you need. 

Take, for example, the first three moves in a chess game. If you memorize a dozen classic chess openings, you can probably hold your own against most grandmasters through move number three. 

(And maybe even up to move seven if you employ a pro tip that I learned from high school chess team: learn how to insult your opponent under your breath in Russian.)

That’s because chess openings are predictable.

Once you get into the mid-game, though, knowing a bunch of techniques isn’t going to help you. There are too many variables, and every move can completely change the dynamics on the board.

When things get complex, mastery of technique and tactics loses relevance.

At that point, you have to based your actions on an understanding of fundamental principles.

In chess, those include things like piece activity, king safety, control of the center, pawn structure, and so on. (Also, if your opponent is muttering in Russian, protecting against an immanent attack.)

Dreaded conversations are another place where memorizing and mastering techniques won't help you.

Like in chess, you can memorize a few openings. My favorite is the OCP (outcome/confidence/permission) formula that I teach in my book and in workshops. But there are others, and they aren't hard to master.

Once the other person responds, however, you're firmly in the world of principles, not memorized responses.

To be clear, you will still be using techniques and tactics. But they'll "work" (ie achieve their purpose) only when they're based on underlying principles.

So what are the principles to keep in mind as you navigate dreaded conversations? 

• Principle 1: Signal Safety
• Principle 2: Orient Toward the Future
• Principle 3: Build Confidence
• Principle 4: Encourage Ownership
• Principle 5: Model Curiosity
• Principle 6: Think in Systems
• Principle 7: Evaluate Experimentally

You can remember these, of course, with the acronym SSOTTFBCEOMCTISEE.

We'll explore each of these principles in an upcoming issue of this newsletter. For now, practice noticing when you can get by with techniques (because techniques can save time by being wonderfully efficient short-cuts), and when you must rely on principles.

If you'd like to become a conversational grandmaster who looks forward to every interaction — even the challenging ones — you can start with my (and Peter Bregman's) book, You Can Change Other People. (Great book, embarrassing title.) If you'd like to accelerate your progress toward becoming a truly "Trigger-Free Leader," let's talk. Click here to schedule a discovery call.

Bonus Time-Waster

Here are some of my favorite (clean) Russian chess insults:

Твой конь — корова. (Your knight is a cow.)

У тебя мозги как у пешки. (You have the brain of a pawn.)

Ты играешь как рыба. (You play like a fish.)

Troy kone - carova.

Utshi beah mozdi kaku pieshk

Ti grayesh katreba.

I’m learning Spanish, which is a pretty good idea since I live in Spain.

My main activity these days is watching videos made by people who have somehow managed to slow down their speech from the normal Spanish pace of 8 zillion words per minute to something closer to the way you would talk if you were trying to train a particularly dense Golden Retriever to play chess.

Recently, I watched a video about a baby who won’t stop crying. The story basically went like this:

The baby is crying. Mama gives the baby a pacifier. It doesn’t help; the baby keeps crying.

The baby is crying. Mama gives the baby a bottle. It doesn’t help; the baby keeps crying.

The formula continues, with a new diaper, a walk in the stroller, and a cuddle. 

Then Papa wakes up and interrogates Mama, giving me another chance to listen to the vocabulary and grammar in the lesson.

“Have you given the baby a pacifier?” “Yes, I gave the baby a pacifier. It didn’t help; the baby kept crying.”

And so on. 

While this approach was brilliant for helping me learn Spanish (not to brag, but I can now walk into any shop in Barcelona and announce, "I changed the baby's diaper"), the leadership coach in me was getting increasingly annoyed.

I was totally empathizing with the poor exhausted Mama, who was being required to defend every one of her actions the minute her husband came up with a new idea.

Yes, she’d thought of the bottle. Yes, she’d tried changing the baby’s diaper. Yes, she’d walked up and down pushing the stroller. Yes, she’d picked the baby up for a cuddle.

Jeez, Papa, just shut up already, I was practically yelling at the screen.

He may have been trying to be helpful and kind, but it didn’t land. Instead, he ended up showing off his own expertise to his wife when she was at her wits’ end.

 Helping Often Looks Like Criticism

I get where Papa’s coming from — he wants to solve the problem and go back to sleep. And he doesn’t just want to tell Mama what to do. So his approach is to ask questions based on what he knows about soothing the kid back to sleep.

What happens for Mama when he does this? She gets annoyed, because she feels insulted. She feels disconnected and out of rapport with Papa, and gets defensive.

 Duh, of course I tried the pacifier. Duh, I changed the diaper. What kind of idiot do you take me for?

And in a defensive neurological state, Mama kisses her creative problem-solving capacities goodbye for the time being. 

So what can Papa do here to really help, when his attempt at finding a solution comes off as criticism? 

One approach is simply to express empathy: “Oh honey, this must be so frustrating for you.”

That’s generally a great start, and often is all that’s needed. Sometimes all the other person wants is to be acknowledged and understood. 

But in this case, there is a problem to be solved, and Mama would absolutely love for the baby to go back to sleep. 

So what can Papa do here?

What Have You Tried?: The Most Respectful Question

Papa is very close to the right answer. Just a tiny nuanced change is all it takes to shift him from a critic to an ally.

Instead of asking, “Have you tried X, and have you tried Y,” all Papa has to do is ask a single, simple question: “What have you tried?”

This question respects Mama’s judgment, and her commitment, and her effort.

It’s intended not to one-up Mama, but bring Papa up to speed so he can participate in finding a solution. 

Now Mama can share all her previous attempts to solve the problem. “I tried the pacifier, and the bottle, and the diaper, etc.”

Papa listens intently, assuming the stance of a collaborator rather than a supervisor. 

As Mama lists what’s she’s tried, she starts to feel a bit better. Heard. Understood. 

And she may even have the mental space to consider new options: singing, aromatherapy, offering her immortal soul to Beelzebub for 10 blessed minutes of quiet, and so on. 

And if Papa at this point offers a suggestion that she hasn’t tried or considered, she’s much more likely to take it in with an open mind. 

There’s More

I’m not suggesting that “What have you tried?” is the only phrase you need. Once you have the answer to that question, there are many possible directions to take the conversation that could be immensely helpful to your partner. 

But starting there conveys interest and respect, and sets you up to act as a helpful ally rather than an exasperated critic. 

Want to learn how to turn dreaded feedback conversations into fun and effective performance improvement chats?

Join me for tomorrow's free online masterclass, "Have That Dreaded Conversation Before Christmas." Register here.

“I didn’t give an employee feedback for six months because I dreaded having the conversation,” a friend whom I’ll call Denny recently confided to me. 

He told me this after reading my Harvard Business Review article, “Feedback isn’t enough to help your employees grow." 

In that article, a coauthor (whom I’ll call Peter Bregman, because that’s his name) and I argue that feedback doesn’t typically improve performance, and often makes things worse. And we offer an alternative approach that focuses not on feedback, but improved performance — which is the goal anyway.

Denny told me that once he read the article, he had zero hesitation about having that conversation with his employee. And they dealt with stuff that had been bothering both of them for almost a year.

Before I understood this, I would have coached Denny to “feel the fear and do it anyway.”

But sometimes, and definitely in this case, the fear was telling him something worth listening to. 

The Three Fears of Feedback

Why do some of us fear giving feedback? I’ve identified three main predictions of suffering:

1. The other person will feel bad
2. I will feel bad for making the other person feel bad
3. It will make things worse by creating tension in our relationship

Over the past 30 years, we’ve been brainwashed into thinking that feedback is the breakfast of champions: the ill-tasting pill that everyone needs in order to become a high performer.

It’s just not true. 

Here’s the thing: feedback isn’t the point. 

The point is improved performance going forward. 

And giving feedback — the way it’s thought of, taught, and modeled — actually undermines performance rather than promoting it.

So those fears aren’t irrational. I don’t advise blasting through them with grit, willpower, determination, or testosterone shots. 

Instead, let’s do something different — something that allows us to have effective and enjoyable conversations that do what we really want: improve performance. 

The Three Mindset Shifts 

We have to make three basic mindset shifts to move from giving feedback to uplifting others.

1. From past to future 
2. From critic to ally
3. From knowing to wondering

Feedback is about what happened in the past, and how it fell short. Uplift is about the future, and what’s preferable.

Telling some how they didn’t hit the mark makes you a critic. Supporting someone to do better next time makes you an ally.

Explaining what they did wrong makes you a knower. Exploring what’s possible makes you a wonderer.

Those mindset shifts are necessary to start having Uplifting conversations, but they aren’t enough. You also need the steps and skills to initiate them and keep them moving in the right direction.

That’s why I’m pleased to offer:

“Have That Dreaded Conversation Before Christmas”

Next week I’ll share my formula for Uplifting Conversations in a live interactive online masterclass. 

You can register here. 

Date: Tuesday 10 December 2024

Time: 1:30-3:00pm Central European Standard Time (7:30-9:00am US EST)

I’ll teach the formula (and share it in a PDF handout for you to download), and do a demo or two with volunteers. 

Depending on the size of the group, we may practice in breakout groups.

You’ll leave the masterclass ready to start having fun and effective performance enhancement conversations — minus the doubts, dreads, and hesitations that made you put off those conversations so far.

You can register here. 

Three Options

If you’re still procrastinating that dreaded conversation, you have three choices:

1. Keep putting it off
2. Get an infusion of courage to overcome your resistance to a painful experience — you’ll have to go elsewhere for that
3. Make it not scary, so you don’t need courage — gain the skills on 10 December 2024, 1:30pm CEST (7:30am US EST) by registering here

Do you ever “lose it”?

By “lose it,” I’m talking about an embarrassingly inappropriate reaction to whatever’s going on. It’s not kind. It’s not proportionate. And it’s never helpful.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never lost it on purpose. That is, there has never been a moment when I thought to myself, “Now’s a really good time to lose it.”

But just because it isn’t a rational, intentional response doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense.

You lose it because something about a situation triggers a very primal threat response. Your mind interprets visual and auditory signals received from your eyes and ears and predicts unbearable suffering if you don’t act RIGHT NOW.

This happens because your mind isn’t a precision instrument. Its job is to keep you alive, not get things right.

And keeping you alive generally means erring on the side of losing it when the situation is benign as opposed to staying chill in the face of lethal threat.

Even though you may have a long history of losing it—perhaps one that rivals mine—it’s still nearly impossible to accept, at that crucial moment, that your mind is an unreliable narrator.

What you perceive feels uncontrovertibly true.

Which means that responding by losing it—whatever that looks like for you—feels absolutely necessary.

The goal of personal and professional development is liberation from prior conditioning, so you have the freedom and flexibility to respond as you desire in every moment of your life.

To have the thoughts and emotions that enrich and empower you to live your best.

You can approach freedom only when you have the freedom to choose new pathways of thought and action.

To liberate your behavior (and yourself) from this conditioning, one of the things you have to do is understand—as in, really really grok—that your perceptions aren’t reality.

But since your mind is the filter through which you experience all of everything, it’s kind of hard to get there.

It’s like when I was a kid, watching TV on my shitty little 13” Zenith black and white TV with a bent rabbit ear antenna, I was never wowed by the commercials for high resolution Sony Trititron. The new TV picture could never be better than the one I was watching.

There are ways of proving to yourself that your mind, as wonderful and useful as it is, doesn’t give a shit about absolute truth.

Optical illusions can do it. I can stare at Muller-Lyer Lines for hours and never actually believe that they’re the same length.

And I can’t accept, not really, that there are 12 unchanging dots in the modified Hermann Grid below, rather than dots that blink in and out of existence as I shift my gaze.

But my favorite brain-breaking illusion isn’t optical—at least, not totally.

It’s called the McGurk Effect, after Harry McGurk, the cognitive psychologist who

studied how very young children perceive language.

Watch a video of me saying “baba baba baba” etc, at one second intervals. You will hear “baba baba baba” etc.

But—and this is a big but, which I love and I cannot lie—when you take that same audio and replace the video with me mouthing “gaga gaga gaga,” you will hear something closer to “dada dada dada.”

And here’s the thing: even when you know for absolutely certain that you are hearing “baba baba baba,” you will not be able to hear the “b” sound when you’re watching my lips make the hard “g” sound.

When you listen with your eyes closed: ba ba.

When you watch my lips with the sound off: ga ga.

When you watch and listen at the same time: da da.

Amirite?

The moral of this story is that it’s OK to not trust your perceptions when they don’t serve you.

Your brain have a bias for “close-enoughicity” over accuracy.

And a bias for “assume the worst and act accordingly” over “maybe this isn’t as bad as it looks, let’s just hang around and see what develops.”

Spending time with Muller and Lyer, Hermann, and McGurk (or any variety of perceptual illusion) can help tenderize your perception of your perception.

Knowing that you get things wrong, and you can’t help getting things wrong, can provide that molecule of space between stimulus and response.

And a molecule may be all that you need to breathe, remember who you are and what you’re about, and respond flexibly and appropriately to what’s in front of you.

I’m Dr Howie Jacobson, executive coach to leaders and their teams. I help you gain massive traction on what matters most to you. What are your best strategies for not “losing it” when you feel the rising tide? Drop me a line: howie AT askhowie DOT com.

“Do you want a statue? Or do you want to serve?”

One of my coaching clients shared with me that he’d been asking himself these questions recently, in a brave and profound exercise of introspection.

He’d begun his entrepreneurial journey from a place of love and service. But along the way he’d been influenced by the Silicon Valley culture of entrepreneur worship, and had felt a pull toward doing things that would enhance his reputation more than doing things that manifested his desire to be of service to the world.

And what he realized is, the two motivations were pulling him in opposite directions.

It reminded me of a proverb, often attributed to Confucius, and first printed in Latin in Erasmus’s Adagia in the year 1500: “Duos insequens lepores neutrum capit.”

For those of you who didn’t take high school Latin, that roughly translates to “Chase two rabbits and catch neither.”

(Confession: I did take high school Latin (proof: “semper ubi sub ubi”), and I needed Google Translate.)

Many of us are chasing more than one rabbit.

Take me, for example.

If you ask me what I want, recognition or the opportunity to serve, I’ll tell you that I’m all about service.

So why do I get secretly pissed off when I do a “good deed” and don’t get enough thanks?

I’m self-aware enough to know that about myself. And sometimes I’m brave enough to admit it.

But I’m sure I’m motivated in ways that I have no idea about.

Take, for example, people high in a trait researchers call N-ach, or “need for achievement.” (Thanks to Richard Boyatzis’ epic work, The Science of Change, for teaching me about this.)

High N-ach folks have a subconscious drive to demonstrate their worth and skill, both to themselves and others. It sounds like a very useful drive, and it is — in situations where there are clear winners and losers, like sports.

But it often comes at a price.

Someone high in N-ach might destroy their health and their relationships to be the top salesperson.

They might start wars and poison the planet in their quest to build the biggest company.

They might play in a sports league and argue and swear and cheat rather than just play hard and have fun.

All of which is to say, they might look back on their life from their deathbed with more than a few regrets.

There are plenty of other rabbits that we chase without realizing it: need for approval, need for belonging, need to be right. (For a depressingly complete list, check out Marshall Goldsmith’s book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.)

Our motivations are our motivations — it’s not for me to judge yours.

But if your hidden motivations are driving you, two bad things are probably happening:

1. They’re interfering with the motivations that consciously drive you, the ones you know you care about
2. They’re pushing you into a smaller life — because our aspirational vision is almost always grander, kinder, and more aligned with our true nature than our unconscious drives

Your deepest vision is bigger than personal success, or making a lot of money, or staying safe.

So how do you discover your secret rabbits, the ones that are distracting you from the rabbits you really want?

By slowing down. By noticing when you feel divided, or pulled in multiple directions.

Whenever you’re not going for what you want 100%, there’s almost certainly a second rabbit in play.

Whenever you notice a feeling of “something’s missing” or “something’s not quite right,” there’s a second rabbit nibbling at a corner of your mind.

Ask yourself, “What else is important to me here?”

Be patient, notice what comes up in your body and mind, and stay with the thread that emerges.

When something bubbles up, reiterate the question: “And what’s important to me about that?”

Keep going until you find the rabbit.

Having multiple motivations isn’t necessarily a problem. Being dragged around by the short and curlies by ones you’re not aware of is.

Once I recognize my desire for recognition, I can choose to let it go, or harness it as part of my service so I don’t end up grumpy and resentful when I do a good deed.

Once an N-ach person accepts that they really like being on the podium (the Gold medal one, of course), they can work toward that goal while still focusing on savoring the journey and growing as a person.

And sometimes when you embrace a life of service, you get that statue anyway.

The first verse of Chuck Berry’s 1959 song “Memphis, Tennessee” goes like this:

OK, this is familiar stuff. The lovebirds were torn apart, and they’re trying to reunite.

In the third verse, we find out some more details:

His girl broke off the relationship because her momma didn’t approve of him. A tale as old as, well, Romeo and Juliet, at least, and as modern as Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.”

But then the fourth verse of “Memphis, Tennessee,” comes along, and changes everything:

Holy schnitzel! Now it’s a completely different song. When I go back to listen to the beginning again, I’m hearing a totally different story. She couldn’t leave her number — I hadn’t paid any attention to how weird a fact that was — because she probably didn’t know it.

Every chord, every word, every line, every image, every vocal inflection — I now hear it as a man mourning the loss of a relationship with his young daughter.

Without realizing it, I hadn’t been listening to the song itself, but rather to the map that I had superimposed on it. I’d unconsciously created a mental shortcut to save cognitive cycles and expend less energy.

Chuck Berry misdirects us, playing with our expectations. He knows that we’ll hear the song in the “I lost my woman” category, and so packs a huge emotional punch when he pulls that rug out from under us.

We carry maps of the world in our heads and project those maps onto what we call reality.

My experience listening to “Memphis, Tennessee” got me thinking about how much of my life experience is mediated through my unexamined assumptions — the maps that I impose on the world.

As Paul Simon wrote, “A man sees what he wants to see, and disregards the rest.”

But perceiving the world through my assumptions is even more pervasive than that; it’s not just what I want to see or disregard, but how I shape and color what I do see to fit my preexisting narratives.

What’s the problem with these maps that allow us to navigate life with minimal energy expenditure?

Basically, we’re not experiencing reality. It’s like trying to play guitar with mittens on — there’s a thick layer between us and what’s really going on. And that means our ability to respond appropriately, in real time, is seriously compromised.

Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski said, “The map is not the territory.”

So the first step in breaking free of limiting, brittle maps is to recognize that all our perceptions are mediated through our maps of reality.

That’s the gift Chuck Berry gives us in “Memphis, Tennessee.” The gift that M. Night Shyamalan gives us in The Sixth Sense. The gift that Neil Jordan gives us in The Crying Game.

Now that I’ve gotten myself started, let me lengthen the list.

Chinatown. Ender’s Game. Fight Club. Gone Girl. The Usual Suspects (that’s two for Stephen Rea!). The Empire Strikes Back. Parasite. Shutter Island. Life of Pi.

The Pina Colada Song. Lola. A Boy Named Sue.

Heck, maybe that’s one of the primary functions of art — to show us the inadequacies of our maps, and to give us a taste of dopaminergic liberation as we watch them crumble beneath the weight of contradictory knowledge.

Once you acknowledge your reliance on a map, you can start asking cartographic questions:

• Where does this map not match the landscape in front of me?
• What parts of the map are blank, or contain untethered cautions (“Here be dragons”)?
• What elements of this map are outdated due to things like tectonic shifts or new construction?

We can’t operate without maps — we’d have to evaluate every photon and every sensation on an instant by instant basis, which would leave us no time or space to extract patterns or make sense of the world.

What we can do, however, is remind ourselves that there is a reality beyond what we can comprehend via our maps, and occasionally peak around them into a world of greater possibility than we could ever imagine.

I’m Dr Howie Jacobson. I work with leaders and their teams to get massive traction on what matters most to you. I’d love to hear from you: What matters most to you right now, and what’s getting in the way of achieving it? Email me howie AT askhowie DOT com if you’d like to have a conversation.

In 1967, the Rolling Stones were instructed to sing "Let's spend some time together" on the Ed Sullivan show, because the actual lyrics ("Let's spend the night together") were deemed too risque for network television.

And so when you watch a video of the performance, you’ll hear them clearly articulate the sanitized lyrics.

While it’s true that Jagger and bassist Bill Wyman engaged in hilarious and impressively acrobatic eye rolling every time the line passed their lips, they most definitely sang “Let’s spend some time together.”

Yet for decades afterwards, Jagger would insist that he and his bandmates had deliberately mumbled the lyrics as an act of protest.

I can so relate.

Not to being a rock star sex symbol.

Editor’s note: great instance of the obligatory touch of self-aware humility.

But to looking back on my past self with embarrassment and even a touch of shame.

It’s commonplace to regret our actions. And not just when we 25. I can replay last week and cringe at things I said and didn’t say; at things I did, and didn’t do.

I recall moments of cowardice, utter cluelessness, and downright mean-spiritedness.

Editor’s note: easy, boy. This is a newsletter, not a confessional.

And there’s something poignant and quite useful about coming to grips with our shortcomings. Without awareness, there’s no possibility for change.

And yet — wallowing in guilt or shame is like touching a hot stove and keeping your hand there.

Aversion can kick off a change process, but it can’t sustain it. As Richard Boyatzis points out in his book The Science of Change, sustainable transformation requires what he calls PEA: Positive Emotional Attraction.

And one of the qualities of PEA is a nervous system tilted toward the parasympathetic —what Boyatzis calls the “renewal” circuit — rather than the sympathetic, which you may recognize as the source of “fight or flight” energy.

If you’re criticizing yourself, your mind codes that as an attack. Doesn’t matter that it’s thoughts and words rather than sticks and stones. Doesn’t matter that it’s coming from inside the house rather than from the outside. (Watch any horror movie if you don’t think that “inside the house” isn’t the most effing terrifying prospect.)

And under attack, your mind activates the sympathetic nervous system, which is all about protection and prevention. In other words, you turtle up — emotionally and often physically (shoulders hunched, head forward, neck tight, eyes and jaw clenched).

In that state, meaningful positive change is impossible.

So what’s the alternative to getting down on yourself for your past shortcomings?

Self-compassion.

That doesn’t mean giving yourself a free pass.

Instead, it means recognizing that you were doing what you thought you needed in order to get through a particular experience.

And by “you” in “what you thought,” I’m not talking about your conscious mind. I’m talking about the deep inner programming that you constructed to stay alive and as safe as possible when you were young.

I know you don’t want to excuse any prior bad behavior with psychobabble. But that’s not what this is.

Rather, it’s exploring those hidden forces that compromised your aspirations for your best self so they come into the light of awareness.

As long as they remain inaccessible to your conscious mind, they run the show.

But once you know what they are, you can begin to root them out.

Think about a time when you were far from your best.

If your body responds with some fight or flight energy, or begins to fold in collapse from guilt or shame, simply breathe. (If it feels like too much, then abort immediately and don’t go there without professional support.)

Pay attention to the underlying fear you were feeling at that moment. (It’s there.)

Be curious: what’s the prediction of worse suffering if you had behaved differently?

Once it comes to you, it may seem childish or foolish.

You may have the thought: “But that’s ridiculous. That could never happen!”

Beautiful! That means you’re collapsing the old belief by subjecting it to the light of actual experience. You’re bumping an ancient, unexamined belief about yourself, about others, or about the world that you may have adopted before you could even talk into your episodic memory.

Dougald Hine, author of At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies, reread a poem that he had written in his 20s and immediate felt embarrassed by his response to the end of a youthful romantic entanglement. He writes:

May we all be kinder to our younger selves, that they might become our allies in pursuing our best, authentic selves today.

My goal for this newsletter is to encourage you to identify what matters most (WMM) to you, so you can get massive traction and move that work forward. The first element of WMM is your vision of your best self (and for teams and organizations, your collective vision of a grand, uplifting purpose for working together).

If you want to share your WMM with me, I'd love to have a conversation with you. Drop me an email howie AT askhowie DOT com and tell me what matters most in your world right now.

Last week, police in Portland, Oregon, searched a stolen car and found fentanyl, oxycodone, methamphetamines, a loaded gun, and a wad of cash.

That’s hardly news.

What caught my eye was the fact that the drugs, guns, and money were all in a zippered pouch labeled “Definitely not a bag full of drugs.”

I am not making this up.

Now obviously, I am telling you this because it’s bizarre and, if I’m being honest, pretty hilarious to those of us who love irony.

But now I have to justify the story by turning it into a metaphor.

Fortunately, that’s easy.

Do you have any weaknesses?

• Maybe you’re a mess with spreadsheets.
• Maybe you run out of energy at 2pm on most work days.
• Maybe you break out in flop sweat when asked to present at meetings.

It’s natural to want people to see us in a good light. Evolutionary, status and reputation were assets that could be leveraged for privileged access to resources (a fertile mate and the best cut of tofu, for example).

And that hasn’t changed as we’ve traded clubs and leopard skins for mobile phones and power suits.

So it’s natural to want to hide your weaknesses from your your boss, your peers, and your direct reports.

Unfortunately, that rarely works.

After all, your weaknesses are weaknesses only because they’re relevant to your performance in a particular context.

I can’t use an astrolabe, for example, but that would be a weakness only if I needed to find the latitude of a ship in the 14th century. Unless I time travel to the deck of a Portuguese caravel in 1389, my navigational deficiency remains irrelevant.

So any weakness that’s identified as such cannot be a secret. Even if you aren’t aware of it, others are (or will be as soon as the situation that calls for that particular skill arises).

If you try to hide your weaknesses, it’s a lot like walking around with street drugs, a pistol, and cash in a bag labeled “Definitely not a bag full of drugs.”

As all political operatives know, “It’s not the crime; it’s the coverup.”

Having a weakness is a lot less of a problem than having a weakness and trying to hide it.

The gyrations and contortions required to disguise a lack of ability draw far more attention to you than the actual lack of ability.

So what should you do instead?

Own your weaknesses and enlist stakeholders to help you improve.

That might sound like any of the following:

This does a few things.

First, it demonstrates your confidence in yourself — insecure people don’t publicly acknowledge their challenges and ask for help.

Second, it makes you a role model for others with weaknesses of their own.

Third, it alerts others that you’re trying to improve, so they’ll be much more likely to notice when you do.

And fourth, it orients everyone’s energy — yours and the people you work with — toward a solution.

What’s one weakness that’s getting in the way of your best work?

Have you been trying to hide it, work on it in secret, or pretend that it’s no big deal?

Who might you approach to share that weakness and request help?

I’m a big believer in fostering psychological safety at work.

Without it, people will play it safe.

They won’t take big swings.

They’ll keep their concerns to themselves.

They’ll defend the status quo rather than seek creative new ways to proceed.

Oh, and the workplace will suck. People will be miserable. And that misery will ripple out into the wider world.

When psychological safety is lacking in your organization or division or team, creating it becomes What Matters Most. And all other outcomes and goals and priorities and values take a back seat.

So how can we create a psychologically safe workplace that rewards innovation and risk-taking and honesty?

As a coach, consultant, and facilitator, I traffic in the deep psychology and neurophysiology of threat and safety. In gigs where people don’t feel safe at work, I teach my clients about their triggers, glitches, and scars — old patterns of protection that signal danger to themselves and others.

And I guide them to master their mindsets so they can respond appropriately to current reality, rather than the superimposed maps of danger that were installed through past experiences.

You can read about this approach in most of my Mindset Mastery Memos.

Today I want to address the issue of psychological safety on a very different level.

My friend, psychologist Glenn Livingston, had a long and successful career as a marketing consultant to some of the world’s biggest companies, including major food conglomerates. (For the last decade, he’s “atoned” by teaching people how to defeat their food cravings and master their unwanted impulses at DefeatYourCravings.com.)

When we got on the phone to talk about how leaders can foster psychological safety in their teams and organizations, Glenn shared five practical tips.

A quote misattributed to Hemingway advises us to “write drunk, edit sober.” (I want to make it very clear that’s a metaphor — I’m not lining things up for my next book, The Shitfaced Creative.)

Divergent and convergent thinking are two completely different modes of operation, and they work best with a nice big firewall between them. That way, you can access the opportunity-seeking capabilities of the “Discover” mind (divergent) and the discerning qualities of the “Strategic” mind (convergent).

Glenn advises creating and publicizing a gentle ritual to point out when convergent, critical thinking sneaks its way into a brainstorming session.

In one company where he was consulting, team members decided to ding the side of their water glass with a tea spoon when they heard a “negative word.”

Eventually, people began dinging themselves, catching their mental train earlier and earlier. This process (which Glenn dubbed “self-dingulation”) gave participants the awareness to notice when their train of thought-habit was about to jump tracks and run over innocent bystanders.

We are creatures who crave safety and find uncertainty unsettling. Small meetings — me and seven others, max — allow my brain to focus both on the proceedings and the emotional tone of the other participants.

In a room or on Zoom, I can just manage that many faces without losing track of what’s being said.

A corollary to the small number of participants rule is to install a practice by which everyone contributes something to every meeting they attend.

That’s because when people don't talk in a group environment, other people fear that the silent ones are judging them.

When people don’t speak, people like me can’t help but wonder what they’re thinking. Are they mad at me? Do they think I’m an idiot? Are they silently plotting to encase my stapler in Jello?

So whether it’s simply a routine that everyone says hi at the beginning, offers an opinion or preference in the middle, and shares one takeaway or question at the end, this attention to inclusion makes people feel better.

Because we have bodies (or “we are bodies,” depending on your views of metaphysics, ontology, entomology, and astrology), it’s important for an underlying sense of safety to make sure those bodies are cared for.

That means working bathrooms nearby with sufficient capacity for the crowd they serve.

Access to food and drink. (And for the long term, ideally, healthy food and drink.)

Reasonable work hours with frequent breaks.

And attention to ambiance: temperature, air flow, and humidity.

Once these fundamentals are in place, we can talk about the “fuzzier” aspects of a culture of psychological safety.

My goal for this newsletter is to encourage you to identify what matters most (WMM) to you, so you can get massive traction and move that work forward. If you want to share your WMM with me, I'd love to have a conversation with you. Drop me an email howie AT askhowie DOT com and tell me what matters most in your world right now.

When I work with a client to help them achieve what matters most to them, we spend a great deal of time and focus on the relationship between them and their mind. (Sometimes I’m the couples therapist of last resort — things can get ugly in there.)

I talk about “Mindset Mastery,” but that’s not exactly accurate.

(Alliteration rarely is.)

Because as anyone with a mind knows:

You can’t master your mind.

At least not in terms of dominating it, controlling it, and forcing it to think and feel and remember and imagine what you want it to.

When your mind gets an idea in its head, are you not pretty much along for the ride?

Let’s say, for example, that you present an idea in a meeting, and Sally follows up by pointing out a couple of serious flaws in that idea.

If you were in control of your mind, how would you want it to react to this turn of events?

• You’d want it to get curious, so you’d ask questions about her perspective.
• If you found her concerns valid, you’d want it to be grateful, so you’d express your thanks graciously.
• You'd want it to be open to exploring what you had missed and why, so you could learn from the experience.

Most of us aren’t in possession of that kind of mind, are we?

I know I’m not.

When I receive any kind of “constructive feedback,” my mind orchestrates a bodily reaction that has more in common with the klaxon alarm that accompanies the meltdown of a nuclear reactor than the gentle ringing of a meditation gong.

How about you? Does your mind insist that the person who just criticized your idea in a meeting is a present and lethal threat to your life? Does it scream that you must either destroy them or run away as fast and as far as you can?

Here’s how you might tell: it might initiate a whole bunch of physiological changes without asking for your input:

• dilating your pupils (so you see your attacker better)
• raising your heart rate and blood pressure (to increase your available energy stores)
• sending blood and energy where it's needed (to your legs so you can run away or to your jaw so you can to bite)
• pausing long-term projects like digestion, immunity, repair, and reproduction so it can shunt all available energy into staying alive

None of that is helpful when you’re dealing with Sally and her concerns.

In fact, your mind’s strategy can be downright calamitous. And if you don’t intervene quickly, you’ll almost certainly end up doing or saying something you’ll regret later.

So how can we insert wisdom into this process, in order to override the wildly misguided fight-or-flight mind and instead engage with curiosity, compassion, and courage?

There are many ways, and you can alway go deeper and discover more about yourself and your mind in the process.

But for now, I want to focus on a single, simple, powerful practice that can begin to break the pattern. Their goal isn’t to create wisdom per se, but rather the space in which wisdom can enter.

In 1989 I stumbled upon Michael Gelb’s wonderful book, 

Body Learning, which introduced me to the work of F. M. Alexander, founder of the Alexander Technique. And one of the technique’s key principles Gelb highlighted was “inhibition.”

That is, if you want to adopt a new behavior or way of being, first check and see what you do naturally, by default, and inhibit it. Don’t try to replace the old behavior with the new one; not at first, anyway.

Instead, just practice NOT doing the old thing.

When it comes to habits of mind that arise in the face of a perceived threat (aka “stress”), inhibition is the first step.

Let’s practice some stress inoculation. Like a real inoculation, you’re going to give yourself a tiny, attenuated dose of the real thing so you can learn how to deal with the full-blown experience should it arise.

Identify a mildly stressful thought. It might be something that happened that you are angry or upset about. It might be something you fear might happen in the future that would make you angry or upset.

Ideally, your stressful thought will be about a 1 or 2 on a scale of 1-10, where 1 is “no biggie” and 10 is imagining being dropped into a lake of boiling lava by a Bond villain.

Step 1: Bring the thought into awareness.

This is a key step — you assuming agency over the thought. It’s not mugging you. You’re inviting it to a cage match.

Step 2: Notice your body’s response.

This may include any of the stress symptoms I mentioned earlier, or your own special kaleidoscope of hormones and neurotransmitters gone apeshit.

Step 3: While focusing on the thought AND your body’s response, begin to breathe in a way that calms you.

If you’re new to this, just take long, slow, deep breathes.

If you’re familiar with breathwork, you’ve got a whole array of techniques at your disposal: coherence breathing; box breathing; 4, 7, 8 breathing; exhale longer than inhale; xi breathing from Qi Gong — it’s all good.

If you feel the thought losing potency, bring it back with slightly heightened intensity.

If you find the stress response in your body fading, amp up the thought.

And keep breathing those calming breaths.

Doing this for 3 minutes, twice a day, will create an inhibitory habit.

And once that’s in place, you can begin to fill the space with wisdom.

Which we’ll talk about in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.

Are you a leader responsible for the activities, mindset, and emotional tone of a team? I specialize in Mindset Mastery, so you and your team can focus on What Matters Most and Uproot your Blockages. Reply to this email to find out more and book a free 30-minute discovery call.