Tag: leadership

Love and Activism

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A few years ago I was on a nonprofit leadership training retreat, when everyone had to go around the circle and declare their “purpose.” This was the sort of exercise I dreaded, so I scrambled to come up with something plausible I could say that wouldn’t be too embarrassing. Then I heard one of the retreat leaders announce that her purpose was “love.”

My eyes widened and it took all the energy I could muster to keep from rolling them. “Love?” I thought. “Really? And this is a professional leadership training?”

It’s easy to be cynical about the word “love.” It’s exploited to sell products and convince us we need lots of self-improvement to be worthy of it. In Hollywood movies or on TV, it’s mostly young beautiful women who find it (the movies are much more forgiving to men), prompting the rest of us to feel we should rush out and buy whatever we can be duped into thinking might allow us to make ourselves over into that image. The obsessive focus on the self that creates actually leads to the opposite of love: self-consciousness and self-loathing, as well as a cramped and defensive view of everyone else.

The popular view of nonromantic love, meanwhile, is the perfect immediate family, consisting of mother, father and several children, all happy, attractive, posing perfectly for their envy-inducing snapshot on Facebook.

I’ve since gotten to know that retreat leader better, and I don’t think she meant any of those things. I think she was talking about a far more expansive, and healthy, understanding of love, one that leads to the opposite of self-consciousness, narcissism, and envy; one that instead helps dissolve the boundaries between ourselves and the world around us, opening up greater possibilities for engagement, and for joy.

The research psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls this “positivity resonance.” Fredrickson is a professor at the University of North Carolina and a leading researcher in the study of positive emotions. Her book, Love 2.0, offers an intriguing and I think really useful look at the whole concept of love: what it means, when it occurs, and the powerful physical and psychological effects it has on us – and its potential to connect us to a much broader range of people in the world.

Not surprisingly, Fredrickson finds that love is nothing like what we see in the movies. It’s not something you fall into or have unconditionally or need to find from that one special someone you’re searching for. It doesn’t require commitment or long-term bonding or even shared values, although those things can help create conditions that encourage it. But in itself, love is an often fleeting feeling you can have when you connect with almost anyone, including a complete stranger, under the right circumstances. It has a powerful impact on our bodies and our health, and literally synchronizes people as their brain functions mirror one another’s. Studies show the experience of this sort of love actually creates a broader perspective and understanding, of ourselves, of the other person, and of everything around us. What’s more, its quantity is unlimited; it’s an emotion we can develop and increase, regardless of our current relationship or family circumstances.

Obviously, this isn’t specifically romantic love, although that’s one form of it. But the kind of love I’m talking about doesn’t depend on finding any one perfect “soulmate” somewhere out there in the universe. It’s simply, as Fredrickson defines it, “that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being, and is “perhaps the most essential emotional experience for thriving and health.”

What I like about this view is that it so clearly corresponds with actual human experience, and defies the silly cultural expectations that love be everlasting, unconditional, or limited to one person at a time. Rather, just as we experience it, love is an ever-shifting emotion that comes and goes, arises and fades away. It’s not exclusive. It’s not a unique feeling you reserve for one partner, or for immediate family or friends.

Positivity resonance is literally a “back and forth reverberation of positive energy.” Indeed, brain imaging studies done by Princeton professor Uri Hasson have shown that connection between two people actually creates synchronized changes in both people’s biochemistry. Hasson and his colleagues have shown that parts of people’s brains literally into sync during emotional moments – what Hasson calls “brain-to-brain coupling.” It’s how we understand each other.

The impact of this emotion on our bodies is astonishing. Love or positivity resonance strengthens the vagus nerve, which reaches from the brain down through the body to the abdomen, and touches most major organs along the way. The vagus nerve plays a key role in the parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates the body’s stress level. A strong vagus nerve, or high vagal “tone,” as its measured, means the parasympathetic nervous system is working effectively to reduce the negative impact of stress on the body — slowing your heart rate after a frightening experience, for example. Scientists view vagal tone as a reflection of the strength of the immune system; a strong vagal tone make us more resistant to a broad range of diseases, including heart failure, stroke, arthritis, diabetes, and even some cancers.

Love also affects our bodies by increasing levels of the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin has long been known to be critical to mother-child bonding and sexual connection, but it’s also been found to increase during much more subtle emotional and social interactions. Oxytocin triggers the release of serotonin, which leads to increased feelings of happiness and reduces levels of stress. (Most anti-depressant medication similarly tries to increase the brain’s serotonin levels.)

The encouraging thing about all this is that it’s largely within our control. Increasing this sort of love is ultimately about letting yourself be open to it. Sure, there are formal practices designed to induce loving feelings, like lovingkindness meditations, or reflecting at the end of every day on the most positive interactions you had with other people, which can be very effective. (Fredrickson has studied these practices and finds that if done over time, they actually increase vagal tone.) So, too, can simply increasing awareness of the positive impact true connections can have.

Daily interactions, with colleagues at work or neighbors in the dog park, for example, can take on a new meaning. Instead of merely awkward small talk by the water-cooler or bleary-eyed encounters picking up dog poop in the morning, they become opportunities for increasing positivity resonance and better health.

Positivity resonance can support social activism as well. Instead of focusing only on achieving a particular outcome, which may be elusive, the possibility of connecting in a real way with others doing the same thing –- and experiencing the same frustrations — can give our advocacy work a whole other purpose.

This sort of “love” can help counter the burnout advocates so often feel in another way, too. Focusing on the problems of the world and seeing few easy solutions can quickly lead to pessimism, despair and depression. Focusing on positive feelings for those who you might benefit, on the other hand — what lovingkindness meditation does — can really lift the spirit.

Meditations on love and kindness or positive interactions with neighbors, colleagues or clients won’t stop wars or save the planet or directly help those suffering the consequences of those disasters. But if practiced regularly and sincerely, they can renew our sense of hope by changing how we feel towards other people, including those most harmed by the world’s problems. And that can help keep us motivated to do what we can to help.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

What if Competence is Just a Mindset?

mindset-for-achieving-goalThere are a lot of reasons I love this recent story by Bruce Grierson — What if Age is Nothing But a Mindset? — that ran in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago.  If you missed it, it’s worth a read, if only for how it reinforces the power of our minds over our bodies and our perspectives on our lives and possibilities.

But there’s also this mention in there of a previous study by the psychologist Ellen Langer, the subject of the piece, that really struck me. Here’s Grierson’s description:

Langer gave houseplants to two groups of nursing-home residents. She told one group that they were responsible for keeping the plant alive and that they could also make choices about their schedules during the day. She told the other group that the staff would care for the plants, and they were not given any choice in their schedules. Eighteen months later, twice as many subjects in the plant-caring, decision-making group were still alive than in the control group.

I find this fascinating, not just for what it says about how we treat the elderly, but also for the implications in the workplace.  I hear repeatedly from clients — and have seen firsthand — how employers undervalue their employees, fail to recognize their talents and skills, and therefore fail to give them adequate responsibilities and work that challenges them.  The result is not only employers who waste time and money hiring outsiders to do the job their own employees can already do, but the rapid demoralization and incapacitation of the employees themselves.

Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze talk about this in their book, Walk Out, Walk On.  I’ve quoted parts of this before, but I think it’s worth revisiting in light of the Langer study.  Wheatley and Frieze write that rigid hierarchies and “command-and-control” leadership — “the most common form of leadership worldwide” — actually “smothers basic human capacities such as intelligence, creativity, caring and dreaming…. When it doesn’t work, those in power simply apply more force…. People resist the imposition of force by withdrawing, opposing and sabotaging the leader’s directives…. This destructive cycle continues to gain speed, with people resenting leaders and leaders blaming people.”

“This cycle not only destroys our motivation, it destroys our sense of worth,” they write. And it’s why people stuck in rigid hierarchies “can’t remember when they last felt good about themselves or confident in their abilities.”

“Power of this kind,” they continue, “has a predictable outcome: it breeds powerlessness.  People accept the message they’ve heard so consistently, that they’re helpless without a strong leader. They become dependent and passive, waiting for a leader to rescue them, and their growing dependency leaves leaders with no choice.  They must take control if anything is going to get done.”

I’ve seen this happen repeatedly in organizations. Leaders get so caught up in their top-down command models that they end up creating zombie employees who will do just enough to get by but not more, because they’re “not authorized” or that’s “above their pay grade.” And they come to believe that they’re not capable of more, either.

Being treated as incompetent can also leave employees seething. But if you find yourself in this situation, the key is to channel that energy into something productive rather than letting it eat you up inside and fuel that destructive cycle.  Even if for now you have to follow the rules at the organization you work for, keep reminding yourself what you know you’re capable of, because that will eventually help you leave the organization, act outside of it or change it.  To remember your own talents and abilities, try reflecting on a time when you were in a position to act on them and what you were able to accomplish (recall a “peak experience” when you felt empowered, for example), and find supportive people around you (such as a friend, family member or coach) who can remind you of those times and of your strengths.

Ultimately, as Langer tells Grierson, it all comes down to being aware of what’s going on around you, and not giving in to the labels, judgments or expectations someone else may have slapped on you or on a situation that have little to do with reality.

“If people could learn to be mindful and always perceive the choices available to them,” Langer says, “they would fulfill their potential and improve their health.”

Grierson, quoting Langer, sums it up:  “When we are ‘actively making new distinctions, rather than relying on habitual’ categorizations, we’re alive; and when we’re alive, we can improve.”

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Start Where You Are

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The view from my roof at sunset.

I’ve been trying to get outside more.  I love the outdoors, but the noise and congestion of New York City can make being out on the street pretty unpleasant, so lately I’ve been escaping to the roof.  I’m lucky to have access to a rooftop, and I’ve discovered that sunset yoga up there can be pretty amazing — and free.

The problem is that getting to the roof requires climbing up a ladder that’s in a really disgusting old utility closet.  The closet was disgusting when I moved into this place 17 years ago, filled with corroding old paint and stain cans, various kinds of cements and glues and solvents and other toxic substances that inevitably leak and spill and are really hard to safely (and legally) dispose of.  So somehow, I’ve never cleaned it out.  But now that I’m climbing that ladder to get to the roof more often, the nastiness of the space has really struck me.

I’ve also been reading Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze’s book, Walk Out, Walk On, which I’ve written about here.  One of the most striking stories in the book is of a group of people in Brazil who took an abandoned apple warehouse filled with sludge — “layers of dirt, asbestos, syringes and excrement” — and turned it into a thriving community center. Organized by a group of Brazilians who started the “School of Warriors without Weapons,” the community of Paqueta, realizing that no one else was going to come clean up that old warehouse for them, decided to take on the task themselves.  Working just 15 minutes a day each, volunteers who’d created a vision for what they wanted the place to be cleaned out the 11,195-square-foot warehouse and transformed it into something their community really needed:  a healthy public space.

It’s an amazing story that inspires me in all sorts of ways, especially as I think about how coaching skills could help advocacy and community organizations. But what it inspired me to do the other morning was to clean out my closet.

After descending the ladder, I was about to just close the door once again on the dirt and muck and leave that project for another day. Maybe I was influenced by that post-yoga feeling of well-being, but it suddenly struck me that no one else was going to come and clean that closet up for me.  And that actually, doing just a little at a time wouldn’t be all that difficult.  Sure it’s kind of gross, but I can wear rubber gloves.  It’s really not that big a deal.

So I pulled out the gloves and some sponges and paint scrapers and I cleaned the damn thing up.  And you know what?  It wasn’t that hard.  I haven’t gotten rid of all the old containers in there yet, but it only took me about an hour to clean up the layers of grime that had built up on the shelves and the molding, and the chunks of debris scattered on the closet floor.  And man, did I feel better afterwards.

We’ve all had that experience:  some task looms before you that you don’t want to tackle because it seems really impossible and unpleasant and like it will take forever.  But imagine how nice it will be when it’s done;  then just start where you are.  Eventually, you’ll get there.

“Start Where You Are” is also the name of a Pema Chodron book I like that makes a really helpful point.  You can’t get to the good stuff without going through some bad stuff too.  Pema puts it more eloquently:

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness–life’s painful aspect–softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose–you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.

I’m not equating cleaning out my closet with life’s most painful moments.  But the point applies even to the simply unpleasant and annoying tasks we try to avoid:  if everything were easy and good and clean and beautiful all the time, we wouldn’t really see and appreciate it. Nor would we appreciate how difficult life can be for others, whose lives may be dominated by many more annoying, difficult or even truly wretched circumstances. Even in taking on grubby little chores, we can find compassion for others, and greater possibilities for ourselves.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

Power, Play and Hierarchy

40694-24568For anyone who questions rigid hierarchies and power structures or just feels discouraged or deflated by them, the book Walk Out, Walk On: A Learning Journey Into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now, by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, is worth checking out.

“Walk Outs,” the authors write, are “people who bravely choose to leave behind situations, jobs, relationships and ideas that restrict and confine them, anything that inhibits them.” They “walk on” to “ideas, people, and practices that enable them to explore and discover news gifts, new possibilities.”  Rejecting rigid hierarchies and outworn notions of how things should be done, they learn and create new things.

The book traces seven projects in different parts of the world where individuals and communities created something out of what looked like nothing, relying not on outside expertise or a pre-designed plan, but on the dreams, ingenuity and creativity of local people joining together to build something they need.  I won’t get into the different projects here, which are really pretty amazing and worth reading about.  But I do want to share a few choice observations on power and hierarchy from the authors that could apply as much to a modern workplace in midtown Manhattan as to an impoverished favela in Brazil, the site of one of the projects described.

In physics, power is defined as the rate at which work gets done. This works fine for machines, but it has no relevance for humans. Yet many leaders assume that people are machines, that we can be programmed, motivated and supervised through external force and authority. This “command-and-control” leadership smothers basic human capacities such as intelligence, creativity, caring and dreaming.  Yet it is the most common form of leadership worldwide.  When it doesn’t work, those in power simply apply more force…. People resist the imposition of force by withdrawing, opposing and sabotaging the leader’s directives…. This destructive cycle continues to gain speed, with people resenting leaders and leaders blaming people.

This cycle not only destroys our motivation, it destroys our sense of worth…. It’s also visible in rigid hierarchies where people, confined to small boxes, can’t remember when they last felt good about themselves or confident in their abilities.

Power of this kind has a predictable outcome: it breeds powerlessness.  People accept the message they’ve heard so consistently, that they’re helpless without a strong leader. They become dependent and passive, waiting for a leader to rescue them, and their growing dependency leaves leaders with no choice.  They must take control if anything is going to get done.

What if solving a problem were instead approached as playing a game, write Wheatley and Frieze, and everyone with something at stake were invited to participate?

Games invite us to let go of our resignation and our sense of limitation – and simply to start dreaming, creating and imagining…. In the logic of play, people are invited to break rules, experiment, innovate, and be original…. Play returns us to a state in which we can see what’s possible–not what’s so…. We are inspired to experiment, to try out new ideas, to take ourselves a little less seriously. We do not have to conform to what we already know.

That’s the reasoning underlying the kind of leadership that leads to the stunningly successful projects described in this book.

It’s also consistent with new social science research showing that people perform much better and have far more energy for tasks they choose to do because the outcome matters to them, even if the task itself seems somewhat tedious, than for work they don’t really care about.  And people generally care far more about work they’ve chosen, using methods they’ve created, than work they’re told to do following someone else’s dictates.

All of this may seem obvious.  But it’s surprising how few leaders in workplaces consider this.  As I’ve written before, your boss may or may not be among the more enlightened leaders, but there are ways of setting your own goals and choosing your own means of accomplishing them that can go a long way towards putting you in the driver’s seat of your own work.

And if your job really doesn’t allow you that?  Then it may be time to “walk out” and “walk on.”

 

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting

A Labor Day Launch


For most people, Labor Day is the last day of summer vacation, a time to enjoy the final barbecue or picnic or party of the season before heading back to work or sending the kids back to school.

But it’s also a good time to think about work – what it means to us, and the huge role it plays in our lives and society. There are, of course, huge problems with work in this country, most obviously how unequally people are paid for it, both historically and now, and the ongoing failure of our public policies to deal with that.

In this new blog, I’m focusing on the more personal dimension of work: what makes it satisfying, aside from the paycheck, which we all tend to think is too small. In my own career, I’ve gone from being a lawyer to a journalist and then some mix of the two, all in a quest for some sort of meaning and fulfillment. Both aspects of my career have provided me some of that, more or less at different times.

Still, more recently, I’ve wanted something else:  to contribute more directly to the people around me. As a human rights lawyer, I advocate for a more humane and less bellicose U.S. national security policy, and try to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention center or restrain the United States’ remote-controlled drone killings of suspected terrorists. But the benefits of that work feel very distant and intangible. Who am I helping, really, and how? What are the actual consequences of lobbying Congress and the White House, or of writing op-eds and blogs to try to sway public opinion? It’s all pretty unclear.

So over the last year, I’ve embarked on a new adventure: coaching. The idea isn’t completely divorced from my experience: it actually came out of being a National Security and Human Rights fellow with the Rockwood Leadership Institute, which runs trainings and fellowships for “leaders” in the nonprofit advocacy world. (I put “leaders” in quotes only because the underlying idea is that we’re all leaders in one way or another, not only within our organizations but also in our own lives. Job titles don’t necessarily capture that.) As part of the fellowship, I was assigned a coach, who I worked with over the course of several months. I found that experience, along with the fellowship retreats, to be really eye-opening. Most importantly, it helped me realize that we have more choice over our own experiences of work than we tend to acknowledge. It’s far easier to blame someone else – a boss, senior manager or colleague, usually – for our frustrations and dissatisfaction, than to look at our own actions and how we’re contributing to a bad situation.

That’s not to say that a boss, manager or colleague isn’t annoying or even doing something to actively obstruct us or make our lives more difficult. It’s just that focusing our attention on that is usually counterproductive: it just makes us angrier. Through my own coaching experience, and now intensive coach training, I’ve come to realize I do much better if I focus on what I can do to change and direct my own experience.

Since starting a coach training and certification course last Spring, I’ve been really delving into this question: how can each of us change, and improve, our own work – and life — experiences? How can we make choices that direct our own lives toward how we truly want to live them? And how can we gain sufficient clarity to become truly aware of our current experiences, our desires for the future, and the steps we need to take to move in that direction?

I’m still working as a human rights advocate as I explore this new realm. But I’m also relating to that work differently – more aware and accepting of what I can and can’t control, both about the work itself and its consequences. I know what I can and want to contribute, but I’m also more willing to do that work and let go of the outcomes. It’s a perspective that I think can reduce the stress levels – and burnout rates — of many advocates. It’s an area I plan to explore further.

This new blog is my way of working through some of what I’m learning as I develop a coaching practice and continue my human rights work. While the two might seem incompatible, they’re not, really: it’s all about human dignity. In my view, we all have a right to work and to live in a way that’s meaningful to us. That will mean something different to everybody, but I hope the insights I’m learning and will share here, and with my coaching clients, prove useful, even in some small way, toward helping people realize that real potential – and their own human right.

by Daphne Eviatar, coaching & consulting