This is the third, and probably last for now, in a series of posts on habits. The last post I focused on creating new habits, and how to make them sticky. This one is about breaking a habit, or, to stay with the same theme, unsticking a habit.

This  is far more complex because  un-learning something involves more analysis and more steps than simply doing something new.

Primarily, to un-stick a habit, you  first have to hack it. You have to investigate the eco-system of behaviors surrounding the habit. You have to do a little sleuthing to decide, who is the real culprit? It’s not always the habit that’s the bad guy. Here are three important things to consider before trying to stop a habit:   (more…)

This past week I was in Yachats attending the Mindell‘s seminar, and pondering the question they were posing, what moves you? Writing about motivation, leadership and learning, we can begin to forget this question and think that I move myself. I decide. I lead. I determine a course of action, what strategies to take, what directions to pursue. But it’s not so simple. The “I” is not necessarily a unified thing. We each have multiple and conflicting parts, drives, desires, reactions, needs. (more…)

The last decade is a strong contender for the title “the decade of dubious leadership.” From the handling of Katrina to the collapse of the banking system, it was a disastrous decade for leadership. Ironically, it was also a decade during which more was written on leadership than ever before. I’m hoping for a better decade of leadership, and here are my top five leadership trends I’d like to see take off in the coming years. (more…)

I hesitated a long time before starting this blog because I knew it would be a challenge to keep at it, even when my schedule got busy as it has these past few weeks. I knew I would just have to bear down, set my alarm for 5 am on some days, and just push myself to do it.

Pushing ourselves. This has to be one of the most interesting topics in my work with clients. When to push, when not to push. When is it injurious, even suicidal to push ourselves past limits, past fear and uncertainty, and when is it an act of courage, a needed force for change? On the one hand self-help advocates urge us to take it easy, to love ourselves, just as we are, and not only for what we do. On the other hand, we are urged to push past identities of smallness, to get out our comfort zones, and to go for our goals. How do we know which direction to take? There is no rule. Managing this inner use of power requires self-awareness.

In Deep Survival, a book exploring the psychological and biological reasons some people survive disasters and life-threatening situations, while others don’t, Laurence Gonzales writes, “the Rambo types are the first to go.” He quotes a Navy Seal commander that believing in your abilities too much can lead you to overestimate what you can do elsewhere. A certain respect for the conditions is necessary to calculate risk.

The problem with courage is that it is often used against weakness, fear or limits. We interpret difficult external conditions, or inner fear as an enemy to overcome. But courage is not fearlessness. The best warriors understand that fear is an important signal of danger, and only by listening to it do we know whether it means stop or proceed with caution. If we just push past fear, we can leave ourselves open to injury or death.

It takes just as much courage to retreat than it does to go forward. Courage can be used as a defense because we are afraid to admit defeat, shamed to fail, and hating weakness. This doesn’t take more than the most cursory reading of history to see how many follies, disasters, and collapses of empires resulted from a false sense of courage and fear of looking weak.

Sometimes courage is a suicidal impulse. When I facilitate groups, there is often someone who stands up, takes a deep breath, and says: “There’s something I have to say,” or, “This has to be said.” I cringe because I know what’s coming. Cops call it”suicide by cops:” someone kills themselves by provoking a lethal response. In groups or social settings, and increasingly on email, someone finally decides to put it all out there. “What the hell,” they think, “I’ve kept my mouth shut all this time, now I’m going to tell it like it is.”

I call this launching yourself over the edge – the force we need to get over our inhibition overshoots the mark, and we end up way out on a limb. We pump ourselves up, after having been passive too long, and blast through our inhibitions, going way past where we need to go. We do this because confuse the target of our actions with the inner inhibition we have lived with. In blasting past our inhibitions, we blast the other.

Similarly, we confuse doubts with inhibitions. We think doubts are just a sign we lack belief in ourselves. And popular psychology contributes to this by promoting self-esteem above self-reflection. While we can get past some doubts with encouragement, we can’t get past them all. This is because doubts are thoughts. Our thoughts. The thoughts we’re not identified with. We decide to go with one thought and not the others, so the unloved thought pesters us as a doubt. And the more we don’t love our thoughts, the more dissociated they become. At first they are just nagging doubts, next they come back in drag, clothed as someone else’s thoughts, “John thinks this is stupid.” This only fortifies us, and now, with an “enemy” to fight, we become even more intractable and one-sided, determined to go our own way, and prove ourselves right against naysayers. But decision making is strengthened by considering all the doubts. Bringing in all the possible problems, and truly considering them, makes robust decisions. It’s aikido – open up to the energy and force coming towards us and use it to go forward.

If we are to take the ecological crisis to heart, we have to consider sustainability as a psychological issue, not just an environmental one. What business calls the triple bottom line means factoring social, environmental and ethical factors into profits. For us, it means factoring in our psychological and physical health by having the courage to recognize limits – our own and that of others. Our bodies are like the canary in the coal mine: fear, hesitation and uncertainty are important signals that can help us create more sustainable leadership practices for ourselves and for the people we lead.