Last week the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s oldest and largest Islamist organization, a group that has been banned, off and on in Egypt since 1948, won 47 percent of seats in the lower house of parliament.

Which leads me to ponder a question that has always intrigued me: how does a political party, or an individual for that matter, make the transition in identity (and action) from a radical activist position, outside the mainstream, to the head of government?

Major political transitions are seldom considered to be psychological as well as political events, but how could they not be? The citizens of the former east bloc countries didn’t just wake up one morning with a democratic understanding, attitude and behavior. Growing up in a totalitarian regime results in a state of mind, a set of behaviors that doesn’t shift when government does. Being a member of a banned, radical extremist group to suddenly being the party in the seat of power is a profound shift in identity. Looking at history, the track record for making this transition is not good. Many radical parties entered through revolution and proceeded to jail, torture, ‘re-educate’ or assassinate opponents.

It takes people years to grow into their sense of power, to grow from a young adult dependent on others to being the one responsible for others. Companies grapple with this all the time. Someone is promoted from front line or factory floor into a management position but doesn’t or can’t fill those leadership shoes: they see their new staff still as colleagues, and react competitively with the people they are meant to develop. And this is true everywhere, not just in the business world: parents struggle with this, often failing to recognize their higher rank and resorting to yelling, screaming, even violence when provoked by their children. Teachers who feel insecure or who need their egos stroked are every student’s nightmare. Continue Reading…

My nephew posted this on his Facebook wall this morning:

We all have dreams, but how much are you willing to sacrifice to realize yours? Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Indeed. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Martin Luther King Jr died at 39. And he predicted his own death. On the eve of his assassination he said, in an eerily prescient passage:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.

Taylor Branch, the historian who wrote a trilogy of books on the life of King, said in the PBS show, Citizen King,

The Movement took a huge toll on him. When they did the autopsy, they said he had the heart of a 60 year old, he’s 39. So yes, it took a big toll on him, and he was constantly fantasizing about getting out of the Movement

Continue Reading…

My friend who writes about parenting, bullying, and schools wrote an article called, Parenting a Life of Meaning, In it she asks: Is it really normal that children should hate school? Should we as parents and society tolerate that children spend 6-8 hours a day bored, uninterested, and uninspired?”

There’s a lot written now about the crisis in our public school system. But is it a crisis, or as one author writes, just a bit “like democracy itself, loose, shaggy, and inefficient, full of redundancies and conflicting goals?” Whether crisis or not, right now education is in need of innovation and I don’t just mean technology. Real innovation, and not just sustaining innovation is needed, starting with the goal of education.

The folks at RSA put out a video well worth the 12 minutes to watch. Changing Educational Paradigms asks some very simple yet disruptive questions about education

OK last post about Steve Jobs, I promise. But something else in Steve Jobs’ biography struck me. Even after Apple became the dominant player in the market, Jobs continued to see himself, and his company, as the underdog, having to defend itself against the dominant players. It was as if everything in his world was still Microsoft and he, and his company, were the rebels. He carried this with him, even when it ceased to be true.

In one of his last battles before his death, Jobs fought to keep apps off of the iPad that he deemed in any way pornographic, obscene, or defamatory. He was very serious about it, and in fact, banned some political ads that were too raunchy, a gay travel guide that showed too much skin, and some mainstream German newspapers that had topless photos. Continue Reading…

Which path to choose?

Happy new year. This year a lot more space and time opens up for me, as I step down from my role as the director of training at the Process Work Institute. But I’m finding that the freedom of having more space and time comes with a huge challenge. Do I use this time for what’s most important?  How do I know which one, of the many paths, I should pursue? Continue Reading…

The death of Vaclav Havel yesterday reminds me of the essence of politics, the greater sense of service and community that defines politics in its purest form. Havel, a dissident, playwright and the first president of the Czech republic after the fall of communism, believed in a politics was that was “a practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans.”

His rhetoric about community and relationship is missing in our current polarized and polarizing political climate. Long before people spoke of emotional intelligence, Havel was championing it. In discussing what he learned during his tenure as President of the Czech Republic, Havel says he realized that the most essential assets for any politician are

fellow-feeling, the ability to talk to others, insight, the capacity to grasp quickly not only problems but also human character, the ability to make contact, a sense of moderation: all these are immensely more important in politics.

Is there still room for such kind of politicians? Am I naïve to believe that politics could someday embody these ideals? Perhaps. Yet I hold out the hope that we can and will get there one day.

How and when does power become abusive? I’ve explored this topic here frequently, and while I don’t think power is inherently abusive or corrupting, without education and training on how to use it, abuse of power does and will happen. Hence the title of this blog.

One thing often overlooked in leadership training (which I believe should focus more on power and how to use it well) is that we do not enter positions of power as blank slates, but come into positions of power with our personal story of power. We grew up in a context of power relations, and how we enact the role of the leader is influenced by a social identity forged in part by power relations. Preparing for a position of power should start with an inventory of what one has already experienced about power.

As a coach and trainer, one thing I constantly see is that we seldom outgrow the power identity we grew up with. Not only that, our earliest identity of power  asserts itself under threat or stress. Growing up smaller than the other kids, and being picked on in school, growing up poor or disadvantaged, following an older brother or sister who did better in school, or being the only Jew in the town, all of these experiences are like unresolved wounds or complexes that stay with us, and influence our self-esteem, relations with others, and more generally, how we perform in our roles. We lead with and from our wounds.

And wounding can come from both a deficit and an excess of power, and the complicated mix of both. There is no doubt, as research confirms, low status is wounding. Lack of access to resources, systemic oppression, low self-esteem, internalized lowered expectations and stereotyping influences health, opportunity, success, well-being, happiness, etc. But we are also wounded psychologically by exclusivity, unearned privilege, entitlement, and the “price of the ticket,” fitting into an elite club whose membership is the cost of our authenticity.

But our early experiences with power can also be affirming and enabling. We are empowered through the connection with our lineage, a knowledge of ancestors, connection with the community or with a spiritual belief. We can also transform our earliest suffering into self-esteem and empowerment by awareness of having endured or survived hardship.

Yet unless we develop awareness of these initial experiences, and our unresolved wounds, the temptation to use the power of the role to soothe our pain is too great. Like an addict using a substance to flee a miserable state of mind, power becomes an artificial boost, a ‘substance’ to soothe and alleviate an internal sense of low status. But this isn’t an immutable fate. It can be worked on with focus and self-awareness. I’m looking forward to exploring this and more on the intersection of the person and the role in the Leadership Lab in a couple of weeks.

And yet another good podcast from a reader.  Hellene Gronda from Melbourne sent me this podcast following some of the posts I wrote this past summer on making, keeping, and breaking habits. One of the points I made was that feelings couldn’t be trusted when it came to both starting and stopping habits. For instance, waiting till you felt like working out probably won’t work. You have to just do it, even if you don’t feel like it.

Which raises the issue, that contrary to a lot of popular psychology, trusting our feelings and instincts often times just leads us to make poor choices. The reason? Psychologist and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, Deirdre Barrett says, we’re better coded for threats that are happening right now than threats in the future. Listening to your body, following your gut is good for some things, but not a universal panacea. A great interview with Barrett on her book, Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose, can be heard here, on ABC (Australia).

Well, it’s a wrap…. almost. We’re shipping boxes of binders, exhibits, books, and hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents tomorrow to the accrediting commission, and now it’s a waiting game. It’s been a grueling year – the first application last spring, and now this past fall, responding to their comments and concerns, we had to significantly revise and re-submit.

We hit some real stumbling blocks, some moments when we were all tempted, seriously tempted, to just throw up our hands and walk away. The project was a total meditation on power and effort, of digging deep and pushing forward. Yet at each obstacle, the question came up, is it worth it?

It’s extremely hard to know, because of the psychology (and economics) of sunk cost and opportunity cost. Sunk cost is an economic term for the money or sweat equity you’ve put into something. And opportunity cost is about the future: for every minute or dollar you spend on something, there’s something else you’re not spending it on. And it’s extremely hard to tell which is the better route. Knowing when to push and when it’s not worth it is extremely hard, psychologically. We get attached all the time, to our detriment, because of sunk costs: relationships, jobs, habits, military campaigns, etc.

With this project we had to consider each time we hit an obstacle (and sometimes it seemed to happen daily), what is the future benefit? Can we imagine it? Can we weigh this level of effort against the future cost? How do we know we’re not just hanging on because of sunk cost?

Working with change of any kind, whether with people or systems, understanding the psychology of investment and loss, is critical. Just as I was cooking on this all, my friend Carol Zahner, sent me this link, The Upside of Quitting.

I haven’t disappeared, am just closing in on the finishing line for the accreditation application for the Process Work Institute. Hopefully shipping on Friday. Then I am back in the saddle, have a stack of articles in the queue waiting to be posted!