Hi friend,
This week’s newsletter includes several short sections. Each provides a different angle on growing yourself as a person through conversation. Because in leading, parenting, and marriage, how you speak and listen is where where the rubber meets the road. Conversations aren’t just about results. They are how you become. This newsletter gives you words to grow by.
Works for some
No advice about leadership, parenting or anything else works for everyone. You wouldn’t know this from bestseller lists, where it’s mostly one-size-fits-all advice hidden behind an enticing title. But it’s true: good advice is customized.
I learned this from the Enneagram system of personal development. Each of the nine Enneagram types has a unique motivation, blind spot, and growth edge. Advice that benefits one type can be a disservice to another:
- If you encourage a Nine Peacemaker to be alert to changes around them, they can escape inertia and discover right action. Do the same for a Six Loyal Skeptic and you reinforce anxious vigilance.
- In contrast, “Trust your inner guidance” is chocolate for the Six soul. However, say this to a One Perfectionist or a Five Observer, and you feed their overconfidence.
Different strokes for difference folks. Take this seriously, and you’ll never look at advice about leadership, parenting, or marriage the same way again. For example, Daring Greatly (a fine book by Brene Brown) seems like inspired guidance for everyone. Who can’t benefit from more courage to be vulnerable?
As it turns out, plenty of people. The Four Romantic, for instance, gets preoccupied with their own inner experience, especially the painful parts. Being even more vulnerable may not be useful. Even if Fours take Brown’s advice with a grain of salt (and she does warn against over-sharing), the call to “dare greatly” is distracting. Fours are better off focusing on their growth edges: appreciating positive everyday moments and delivering commitments to completion.
Just as medicine containers have warning labels, I want thought leaders to insert disclaimers into their writings and talks:
- “Not to be taken by overly sensitive people”
- “May cause overconfidence in certain people”
- “Dilute with pleasant small talk before administering”
Invitation: I’m gathering examples of well-meaning advice that works for some but not others. Do any come to mind? Perhaps something you followed before realizing it was counterproductive? Or advice that reinforced the bad habits of someone you care about? If so, please let me know. I’ll share examples in future issues.
Good enough to groove
Conversations are tricky. On the one hand, they make the world. It is through conversations that you lead, parent, and partner. This is big stuff, and you know what that means: it pays to practice. On the other hand, practicing conversations feels awkward, and you’ve heard people say it’s fake.
There are two ways to interpret this:
- Conversations are about being real, so practicing them makes you inauthentic. Conclusion: don’t practice.
- Conversations involve skills, and building these skills frees you to stop thinking about them. This allow you to be present—and real. I prefer this interpretation.
In last week’s podcast, Greg Thomas and Jewel Kinch-Thomas used jazz to illustrate why this is true. Jazz is about improvisation, but you can’t improvise without individual excellence. Beginners are preoccupied with basic skills, so their minds aren’t free to enter the state of flow required to groove. Masters, on the other hand, are so good that they don’t have to think about what they’re doing. They can groove.
Conversations are just like that. Consider the skill of giving feedback. Beginners are often too nice or too tough, too specific or not specific enough. Without practice, they do what’s habitual, often mirroring the way their parents talked to them as kids. Rarely is this effective. In contrast, masters at feedback have spent hours on and off the job practicing new language and attuning to others. These skills have entered muscle memory, so the masters can improvise and be real.
They’re good enough to groove.
I’m learning how to learn
I’m taking swim lessons for the first time since the mid 70s. It’s super fun, and the best part is the method, which offers brilliant lessons on how to better design and practice leadership conversations. The approach, Total Immersion, is different from the way most people learn to swim. The idea is to move further faster with less effort. You use your hips more than your shoulders, arms, or legs (go figure), and you’re always swimming on one side or the other, never on your belly.
Then there’s how you learn, which is relevant to leadership. My coach, Jamee, has us practice a single small part of the Total Immersion stroke in each session. One week it’s doing the Superman glide to practice balancing and relaxing. Another week it’s pulling the back “recovery” arm out of the water and forward a few inches—but not all the way forward, which is a different lesson. Heard of skill chunking? This is micro-chunking, and it’s based on how the brain works. If I practiced the new stroke in its entirety, my brain would recognize this as “swimming” and push me into old habits (remember: my last lesson was in 1977!). Conversely, when forced to practice one tiny skill, my brain forgets that it’s swimming. Micro-chunking disguises the skill drill from my neurons’ habitual firing patterns. This helps me learn.
This has big implications for what we are here to do: practice leadership conversations. 99 percent of leadership workshops don’t ask you to practice anything. The other one percent aren’t designed for human brains. You’re sent off for 10-20 minutes and asked to practice an entire conversation (giving feedback, nonviolent communication, etc.). This blocks learning. You spend (a) too much time (b) doing too few reps of (c)un-chunked skills. What would work better is 15-30 second practice rounds, each focused on a micro-skill, repeated multiple times, with pauses between rounds to reflect and get feedback.
This is how I’m learning to swim. This is how we could be teaching leaders to lead.
Permission-to-despair revoked
There’s a lot in the world to feel angry, scared or sad about. Pick the thing that bugs you most, and a rant is only one Tweet away. Emotions don’t need to stick around forever, but often they do, especially when you return to places that trigger you. Then a fleeting emotion shifts into a persistent mood or predisposition for action. Instead of feeling a moment of anger while watching Mitch McConnell purse his cynical lips, you walk around in anger all day long. Rather than experiencing a moment of anxiety while reading how a hotter planet will flood cities, you bring anxiety into every conversation.
One mood I see a lot of today, especially around climate change and politics, is despair. Despair is the assessment that everything has gone wrong and can never get better. Because it’s a mood, this assessment persists in your mind and body throughout the day. It opens up some possibilities for actions and closes others.
Here’s my assessment of despair: it sucks. When I say “sucks,” I meant it.
Not. Useful. For. Anything.
That’s why I’m revoking my permission to despair—and, while we’re at it, revoking yours.
Just stop.
I know it’s more complex than that, but you have to start somewhere, right?
My starting place is a set of daily practices to undermine despair. These include a 10 minute mind/body morning warmup routine, 15 minutes of full-spectrum light a foot from my face, and journal entries titled “Things that happened today that make me trust myself.” (Remember: Not for everyone! May have side effects! Dilute before using! )
I also do experiments. The idea is this: if you can’t beat despair through daily practice, don’t join it. Dissolve it with humor. Fool the brain into lightness.
Here’s today’s experiment: when I feel irritated by anything, stop what I’m doing, lift my arms into the air like I’m doing the “Y” in “YMCA” and say the following: “Fahhhhhhhhhhhhhhk!”
Immediately, a smile comes to my face. Sometimes, I laugh. Always, I feel better.
And then I do it again. And again. And yet again.
When it comes to “Fahhhhhhhhhhhhhhk!”ing there’s no refractory period. You can keep going until you’re ready to return to your activity.
Invitation: What is a practice or experiment you are using to revoke your permission to despair? Let me know.
Cheerfully real,
Amiel Handelsman
P.S. Did someone forward this issue to you? We’d love to have you join us by signing up here.
Sharing feels great
__________________________________________________
Please forward this issue to a friend. Thank you!
You’re receiving this email because you opted in at my website amielhandelsman.com
To make sure you keep getting this newsletter, please add amiel@amielhandelsman.com to your contacts or whitelist the address.
Unsubscribe | Update your preferences | 7625 SE 18th Ave, Portland, OR 97202