In a post-game interview, L.A. Laker Ron Artest thanks his psychiatrist for helping him relax under the intense pressure of the playoffs.

First reactions to his comments were critical, yet when players thank God or Jesus for help, which they often do, I rarely hear criticism about that.

In my mind, the two are not not that different – both offer a vantage point, a detached perspective from which to handle the extreme stress and pressure of the situation. In fact, I think it would be great to hear more from athletes, politicians, leaders, and others working under fire: what do they turn to for support to help them stay awake and useful under such immense stress?

There’s been an explosion of reality TV contests –  the Next Big Whatever Star. While the chance to become a celebrity lures contestants, I think it’s the grueling rite of passage that lures viewers. Last month we had exams at the Process Work Institute, which were fairly intense 3 day affairs, with 5 different exams per student. It’s interesting that in the adult education field that I’m in, exams are controversial and their value suspect. And yet, there’s this fascination in watching these demanding and punishing contests.

Over the 20+ years we have been training people in Process-oriented psychology and group facilitation, we have gone back and forth between pass/fail exams in some form and a non-pass/fail system of using gates or benchmarks to pass through one phase to another. It seems every couple of years or so, we debate getting rid of exams. They’re an arcane gate-keeping system that does little to foster or measure real growth in knowledge, skills and ability. And yet we come back to them in some form or other. I think, beyond the test of skills and abilities, they offer an opportunity par excellence to stretch beyond oneself, and for that reason, they are hard to abolish. (more…)

Last week the American Psychiatric Associations released a draft of DSM-V, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The final version is set to come out in May 2013. It has a number of proposed revisions which have been widely blogged about, including a new diagnosis of hypersexuality. In just about every post I’ve read, at some point, the author proposes Tiger Woods as the poster child for this new diagnosis.

As a blog on power and leadership, I’ve spent a fair amount of time here discussing instances in which power goes awry, in particular, why and how public figures and leaders torpedo their careers by engaging in risky sexual behavior. How can public figures like Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer and Tiger Woods, believe their sexual behavior can be kept secret from the world?  It is easy to see it as a mental disorder and it very well may be. Undoubtedly we’ll even find the gene that’s responsible, but making this a medical disorder keeps us from contemplating it as a behavior on a continuum, one we’re all prone to. (more…)

It’s been quiet on the blog, but not due to a lack of activity. It’s riding season, and I keep forgetting how much it takes to get in shape early in the season. Reach the Beach in 100 degrees was a sufferfest. But that’s not the only thing keeping me busy. Last Tuesday was the Oregon primary, and the media descended on Portland, along with Obama, Bill and Chelsea Clinton. I’m a sponsor of the third grade at Rigler Elementary, as part of the I Have a Dream foundation, which was one of the organizations taking part in a community service project with the Clintons. So there I was, on Sunday morning, with a small group of kids and adults planting tomatoes and painting murals in a community garden with Bill and Chelsea. After an hour of cameras clicking, tomato planting and painting, I hopped on my bike, and whizzed across town to Tom McCall Waterfront Park to join a throng of 75,000 people listening to Barack Obama.

But with all that activity and excitement, one image keeps replaying in my mind. I had an opportunity to talk for a few minutes with Chelsea Clinton, without the media or other adults around. We chatted about nothing in particular, just small talk about community projects, teaching, and the like. I avoided asking anything political, or about her mother’s campaign, and yet I noticed she studiously avoided eye contact. Now, maybe I’m making a big deal out of this, but she kept her eyes downcast the whole time. Reading into it I got the sense that the public has to be a frightful thing for her.

And this is where this post winds its way back to leadership and power. I’ve been asking, what is it about leadership, about power, that lends itself to abuse or corruption? The problem is, though, the question doesn’t differentiate the person from the role. The leadership role and the person inhabiting that role are not one and the same. Stepping into a role is like stepping into a vortex of energies. You become a target for projections of all kinds: you are admired, hated, feared, seen as a role model, castigated for failing to be a role model. Your role represents qualities that you personally could never fulfill. And the role, as I pointed out in Public Life, Private Selves, has qualities and features that can take on a life of their own. So fully investigating power and its use and abuse has to take into account not just the individual, and what he or she does with power, but the role, and what influence or affect the role has on the individual.

When leaders or those in power are criticized, even if justified, too much is made of their personality, which leads to a dead end conversation: people in power are corrupt, psychopathic or evil. But if leadership can truly be everyday leadership, something for us all to share, then knowing more about the role and how projection and expectation factor into it, is important. There’s a reality to projection, to social expectation, and stereotyping. Studies show that expectations can play a determining role in performance. If teachers expect students to do poorly, students tend to do, well, poorly. And vice versa. High expectations can raise performance. I have had both experiences. I’ve stepped into the role of facilitator, and people expect me to know, and somehow I always find something brilliant to say. Likewise, I’ve been in the facilitator role when it was “take a shot at the leader” day, and well, it’s no fun.

Back to Chelsea. I kept thinking about her childhood, growing up hearing and seeing difficult, critical and nasty things being said about your parents, about you. What it must be like to be in the public eye, while her father’s infidelities were daily fodder for months on end. Then, just as things subside, your mother runs for President, and there you are again, in the public eye, open season. My eyes would be downcast too. Do I want to be open to whatever some stranger might say to me? Or even what they might think? How would I protect myself from that? How do we survive the roles we’re in? Step one is to become aware that we are in roles, that what happens to us is not just personal, but belongs to the role. Peter Block, who writes about leadership and about consulting, says, when working as a consultant, “take nothing personally before 6 pm.” In other words, what happens to you is addressed to the role, not only you.

Too often, our political leaders only embody the role, but not the personal part. But occasionally, there are amazing glimpses of the role and the person, separate yet relating. Later that day, Obama displayed that skill, something I have seldom seen public figures do:. He said, “I tried to run a positive campaign. But I haven’t always been successful in that. It’s hard. When someone whacks you, you get hurt, and want to whack back.” There’s a human in that role. Are we ready for that? Meanwhile, the media say: toughen up, it’s part of the deal to be whacked, whack back, and the American public need to know their leaders can be tough and take it. Or do we? I’d like to ask Chelsea what she thinks. Her eyes, or what I project into them, tell me otherwise.

The following post begins to explore the question of abuse of power, or failures of power. In my earlier post I asked, can we learn how to use power well, like we learn how to ride a bike, or does power really have some corrupting influence? Which, if any, features related to high rank alters behavior or even personality?

A lot has already been written about the now fading scandal concerning former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer. In the heat of the discussion, the question reverberating through the blogosphere was, “What was he thinking?” The easy answer of course, is: he wasn’t. Thinking, as in carefully weighing pros and cons, considering consequences, cost-benefits, and all that, nope, that probably wasn’t done, or at least, done thoroughly. It couldn’t have been a very cogent thought process that led him to pay $80,000 over the course of several years for dates (sessions? appointments?) with high priced prostitutes.

My inquiry here isn’t about sex or prostitution. It’s about risk and the private lives of public figures. What possible thought or non-thought processes allow the Eliot Spitzers, Mark Foleys and Bill Clintons of the world to risk their careers in such high stakes pursuits? Or, in some secret recess of their mind, do they want to get caught, to torpedo a career they don’t, albeit subliminally, want? In his Newsweek.com article, Notes on a scandal, Howard Fineman, writes:

Spitzer is a type I have seen before: a candidate who needs to rocket at warp speed because he does not dare stop to consider whether he really wants to be living the political career he is living. Spitzer, it turns out, hated some or all of what he was, what he wanted to be, or what he had become. Why else would he knowingly risk destroying his life’s career?

One wonders, how many people, at the top, or near to it, find themselves in a life no longer their own? Surrounded by people they don’t like or don’t trust, doing a job they don’t like, or responsible to a public they scorn? Is it much different from anyone of us stuck in a job or role we don’t like? We manage to tolerate it by engaging in things that take the edge off, some illicit, others less so: drinking, hanging with buddies, hobbies, having affairs or visiting prostitutes, etc.

But for a leader in a public position, it’s a different story. We imbue the role of leader with heroic stature, we don’t want to know about the private doubts, fallibilities, and lack of perfection. We don’t want to see ourselves up there, some poor schlub bumbling and stumbling, we want to see heroes.

It’s a love/hate relationship we have with the human side of leadership. On the one hand, we love a personable, folksy, emotionally accessible person, the “Gipper,” the fatherly or motherly figure we can relate to. Yet on the other hand, we demand strength, infallibility, and heroism. And we are surprised to discover our leaders have human desires and needs, just like the rest of us.

This pressure to be perfect we put on the role of leader creates a schism between the public self and the private self. The public self is the hero, the private self remains inaccessible, hidden from public view. And so a gulf begins to widen between the public role and the private self widens, eventually morphing into a compartmentalized existence, a split personality of sorts. Over time, even the leader starts to believe in his or her public self, believing that what’s performed on stage is the real self. Likewise, the private self, the needs, emotions, self-doubt, and desires that are kept out of the picture become so secret that it is easy to believe they don’t exist, that others can’t see them. Because I don’t see this part of myself, others can’t either. But our secrets compel us. Our hidden selves are most dangerous; they become autonomous and push us to do things, even reckless things, in order to be gratified and indulged.

This is a problem for public figures and for all of us in jobs where the role demands a one-sided expression of the personality. And positions of power and leadership are typical of this. In so-called normal life, the boundaries between parts of ourselves are probably meant to be thin, almost permeable. It’s messy this way, but robust and secure. It’s what we call conscience. My professional self is there to remind me when I am at the office party, hey, you have to be at work on Monday with these people, watch yourself. Or, my parental self is never too distant, even if I’m holiday, or out for dinner, the parental antenna is on alert, just in case the phone rings.

But in roles where the stress, expectations and demands are super high, the boundaries thicken, sometimes necessarily so. Walls go up to protect and buffer the one self from the others. Police officers or soldiers for instance, frequently report that they cannot share their experiences with their close friends and loved ones. They come home, sit in front of the TV, or drink, and numb themselves out. They do not, and cannot transition easily between public and private selves because the experiences they have in their public selves are beyond what most people want to hear about.

When power comes into play, the walls between public and private self are fortified by the trappings of the job itself – unlisted numbers, personal assistants, wood paneling and leather furniture, a limo and driver, private jets, mobile devices, and layers and layers of intermediaries that protect them from contact with their everyday self. There’s a scene in the romantic comedy, The American President, where the President wants to get flowers for his girlfriend. But for the life of him, he can’t get past those walls. He picks up the phone, but discovers he can only reach the White House switchboard. He doesn’t have a car he can drive himself. He can’t leave the White House without the Secret Service. Once, he finally manages to get an outside line, the florist shop assistant hangs up on him when he says. “I’m the President,” certain it’s a hoax.

But if we see leaders as heroes, we should remember that heroes and gods are meant, in the words of Whitman, to contain multitudes. Our superheroes all have alter-egos for whom we cheer just as loudly as for their amazing feats of strength. We love Peter Parker as much as we love Spiderman. It makes our superheroes even better, that there’s a flip side to them, that there is someone we can relate to, someone who fumbles in conversation, who wears glasses and pocket protectors and is picked on by the school bullies. Even the Greek gods reflected this paradox. They were venerated for their superhuman abilities and strengths, while at the same time driven by jealousy, vengeance, and insatiable appetites. They were saviors and villains, all without contradiction.

But in our modern version of heroes, in our leaders, we don’t tolerate that dualism. So leaders become estranged from their alter ego, from friends, family, and most of all from themselves. The walls that protect the private self from the public one create a loneliness that can’t be assuaged. We can’t be our self, our full self in public, with needs and desires. But in private, we indulge them. We cannot seek solace in public, where we will be shamed, but in private, with strangers, with people who are paid to listen, paid to care, paid to be nonpartisan. And as Charlie Sheen says, paid to leave afterwards.

In Primary Colors, Senator Jack Stanton, (a thinly disguised Bill Clinton) is sitting in a donut shop, at what seems to be 1 am. He’s the only customer, sitting in that cold florescent light of the shop. The camera pans out wide angle, and we see the empty streets, the loneliness of the city, of the hour, and of the man, as he in turn soothes and is soothed by the guy behind the counter. And you sense, this is what he’s craving, and perhaps what brought him to politics in the first place, the desire to connect with people, the ultimate bringing together of the real self and the public role.

I don’t believe leadership is best served by the parallels drawn to war and sports. It doesn’t capture the sense of service and eldership at the heart of leadership. But I do see one reason why military and sports metaphors are so often used to describe leadership challenges. War and sport have in common the need to develop mental toughness, so what you learn can be done under terrific psychological and physical stress. For an athlete, learning what to do is only part of the preparation; learning to do it on game day is another. That’s the difference between just being athletic, and being a top competitor. The professional athlete’s training includes psychological toughness by simulating game day conditions: high stakes, bad calls, mean crowds, horrible weather, and ruthless opponents. Because every athlete and coach knows that once you cross a threshold of stress, learning and thinking goes out the window. If you get triggered by stress, choking is inevitable. (more…)

Photos taken of U.S. Presidents before and after their terms in office show what a huge toll that job takes on the body. In the four years between inauguration day and the end of term, Presidents often look like they’ve aged 10, not just 4 years.

It’s a grueling job, with a lot of pressure. What we see on the outside is only the tip of the iceberg. Many of us, while not quite as high profile, are in leadership positions that put a terrible strain on mind and body. What happens to the body and mind under the weight of public pressure and tensions of leadership? What toll does public attack and humiliation take on the mind and emotions? What about our energy and drive, after plans and ambitions are torpedoed by opposition, sunk by the weight of inaction, or stalled by endless rounds of skeptical questioning? (more…)