Leadership & Self-deception; Rising Strong; A Failure of Nerve
Summary:
Each of these books presents important insights regarding how and why individuals and groups respond on an emotional level to problems they face. The authors approach their topics in very different ways; however, there are significant similarities in their treatments of the subjects at hand.
In Leadership and Self-deception,” the authors from The Arbinger Institute contend that “Self-deception actually determines one’s experience in every aspect of life” (page xi). They believe that this problem is “at the heart of the human sciences” (page 10).
In Rising Strong, Brene’ Brown introduces her readers to the process involved in “regaining our emotional footing in the midst of struggle…[she does this by slowing] down the falling and rising process: to bring into our awareness all the choices that unfurl in front of us during those moments” (pages xviii – xxiii).
In A Failure of Nerve, Edwin Friedman contends that if we want a “child, spouse, client, or boss to shape up, [we need to] stay connected while changing [ourselves] rather than trying to fix them” (page ix).
Analysis:
Leadership and Self-deception:
In entering into their subject, the author’s from The Arbinger Institute tell a story of the interaction between a mid-level employee within a fictional company and his bosses. The characters are engaged in a one-on-one training session where the employee is introduced to the way of thinking advocated in the book. The problems being addressed grow out of what they label “self-deception,” or the short-hand term “being in the box.” When someone is “in the box” they treat other people more as objects rather than as fellow human beings. They may even be doing the right thing; however, they are doing it the wrong way – with very detrimental consequences, because they are “in the box.”
The way people “get in the box” is by betraying their inner sense of how they should be acting toward other people. Called “self-betrayal,” it means a person acts contrary to what they feel they should be doing for another person. This betrayal of their inner feelings often leads a person down a destructive path to viewing the other people from a false vantage point. Depending on the specific circumstances, this false vantage point supports a person applying various negative labels to other people which then helps to justify their own actions and vision of their self (page 72).
This negative view of the other happens “after” the self-betrayal. The self-betrayal fuels the negative perspective that distorts the other person. The self-betraying person then enters “the box” and becomes deceived. They justify their own behaviors by inflating the faults of others, and at the same time inflating their perceptions of their own virtues. Compounding the problem, when other people act in ways that challenge a person’s self-justifying image created while “in the box,” that other person is viewed as a threat. Unfortunately, after spending significant time “in the box,” the details/aspects of that particular box can grow to become a part of a person’s character.
Layered onto the problem with a person’s own box is the fact that many other people are also in their own boxes. People often come to relationships in a “defensive posture” (page 93). By being in their own boxes, people “provoke others to be in the box” (page 95). Being in the box does not just cause a person to be ineffective, it actually is systemically destructive. When two or more people located “in the box” encounter one another, they seem to collude in their destructive interactions. This collusion encourages them in “mutual mistreatment” and “mutual justification” of their respective distortions of the vision they hold of themselves and the other person. Often the “what” and “who” of a person’s focus when “in the box” centers on the need to justify their own behavior while focusing on themselves and their perceived needs.
One of the most important elements in personal and organizational health is learning how to stay “out of the box.” This is done best during times of more emotional clarity. This is not a matter of interpersonal technique or skill as much as learning to heed the call of the humanity in each and every person with whom we come into contact. Heeding the call to engage the humanity of others is not done out of a sense of guilt, but from a position that recognizes what we all share together. From that perspective we are to “do the best we can under the circumstances we encounter (page 152). Because we are “out of the box” we are “able to assign or assess responsibility with clarity” and without distorted blaming (page 159). Even when we assess problems in other people, rather than blame, we can better enter into a position of offering true help to the other person (page 159).
Rising Strong – Brene’ Brown:
Brene’ Brown begins her book by describing how she became interested in this process of “rising strong” that certain people engage in after setbacks. She kept asking herself, what do those who enter this process well have in common? The answer: “They recognize the power of emotion and they’re not afraid to lean into discomfort” (page xviii). On the other hand, she refers to the two problems that thwart that process as “Gold-plaiting Grit” and “The Badassery Deficit.” When grit is “gold-plaited” the emotional cost of failure has been stripped from our reflection on the experience, and we fail to adequately learn from it. Conversely, when we face experiences with emotional stoicism, blustery posturing, swagger, or perfectionism, rather than “wading into the hurt” and honestly facing our circumstances from a posture of curiosity as to how and why we’ve gotten to where we are, we diminish our ability to move to a place of wholeness and wholehearted living.
Brown begins her description of the process by summarizing what she refers to as the “rules of engagement for rising strong” (page 5). These 10 rules sit underneath her descriptions throughout the remainder of the book. They are:
1). If we are brave enough often enough we will fall…
2) Once we fall in the service of being brave we can never go back…(we can never go back to where we stood before we fell…).
3) This journey belongs to no one but you; however, no one successfully goes it alone.
4) We’re wired for story.
5) Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands.
6) Rising strong is the same process whether you’re navigating personal or professional struggles.
7) Comparative suffering is a function of fear and scarcity.
8) You can’t engineer an emotional, vulnerable, and courageous process into an easy one-size-fits-all formula.
9) Courage is contagious.
10) Rising strong is a spiritual practice (pages 5 – 10).
The rising strong process has three main stages: The Reckoning (walking into our story); The Rumble (owning our story); The Revolution (writing a new ending to our story). The engine that drives us through each of these stages is our ability to integrate the stories we tell into each stage of dealing with the truth we encounter along the way (page 41). Brown begins by describing the importance of story to all of what we do. She then moves on to show the importance of story in this process by describing her experience with her husband and how they struggled with “the story [they were] making up” (page 19). The struggling begins with calculating where you are in the story. An integral part of beginning this process is getting curious about what you are facing. This curiosity most often leads a person to facing the emotions surrounding what has brought them to a point of being “face down” in the midst of their story.
Brown shows that once a person becomes aware of the story they are in, they must choose to enter into the struggle of owning the story by bringing light into the darkness of “what we make up about who we are, and how we are perceived by others”…that causes us to react with “fear, anger, aggression, shame, and blame” (page 75). When we “rumble” with our stories, Brown contends, we “get honest about the stories we’re making up about our struggles, to revisit, challenge, and reality check these narratives…” (page 77).
Brown says that the rumbling requires that we get curious by asking three important questions: “1. What do I need to learn and understand about the situation. 2. What more do I need to learn and understand about the people in the story. 3. What more do I need to learn and understand about myself.” (page 78 – 79). In answering these questions, we need to be warry about our tendency to deal in confabulations (lies honestly told). When identifying the problems in our initial stories (what Brown, quoting Anne Lamott, refers to as our SFDs – shitty first drafts), she offers a helpful sequence to follow in noticing how our story affects our: emotions, body, thinking, beliefs, and actions (page 86). The process of rumbling with our SFDs will yield a “delta” – the difference between our first take on the reality we face, and the truth we discover in the process of rumbling with that first take.
The bulk of the remainder of the book presents Brown’s description of how to “rumble with” a variety of responses to the emotions we encounter when we face various situations that cause us to end up “face down” in the arena of our lives. She begins by examining how the process of rumbling with “boundaries, integrity, and generosity” fit into the process of rising strong (pages 99 – 129). She shows the importance of linking generous assumptions about people with appropriate boundaries in our relationships that allow people to work from a place of integrity (pages 122 – 123).
Next, Brown examines the related issues of disappointment, expectations, and the resentment that can flow from these. She also touches on how these differ from heartbreak and the resulting issues we face when we confront the loss of love and the grieving that ensues. Finally, she moves to examining forgiveness within this context. She also shows how compassion and empathy can grow within us when we train our awareness to see the world from the “floor of the arena” when we have fallen due to the loss associated with each of these issues (pages 131 – 157).
Brown then moves to examining the complicated issues of “need, connection, self-worth, privilege, and asking for help” (page 159). Through telling a series of personal stories she shows the relationship of giving and receiving, and the guilt and fear that attends to this relationship. She reminds us that we come into the world in a dependent state, and most of us leave the world in that same or similar state; however, in the middle of our lives, we mistakenly fall prey to the myth that successful people are those who help, rather than need, and broken people need rather than help” (page 183).
In the next two chapters Brown takes the reader through a discussion of shame and perfectionism in the context of blame, accountability, trust, failure, regret, identity, nostalgia, and criticism. Brown points out the helpful distinction between accountability and blame. Accountability is “holding ourselves and or someone else responsible for specific actions…Blame on the other hand is simply a quick, broad-brush way to off-load anger, fear, shame, or discomfort” (page 197). Accountability is one of the bedrocks of trust. When describing the ingredients necessary for establishing trusting relationships, Brown lists seven: “Boundaries – You respect my boundaries…Reliability – You do what you say you’ll do…Accountability – You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends. Vault – You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share…Integrity – You choose courage over comfort, right over what is fun, fast, or easy…Nonjudgment – I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need…Generosity – You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words and actions of others.”
When confronting failure, Brown reminds us of the “connection between failure and powerlessness” (page 201). She has “found that moving out of powerlessness and even despair, requires hope” (page 202). Brown contends that when we struggle with the aftermath of failure, constructively using regret is important. Being clear-eyed about where we have failed is necessary to tell our stories well and own those stories wisely. In order to get to the “delta” required to learn from these failures, we must face the shame that often accompanies those failures. Brown has found in her research that those with “high levels of shame resilience: 1. Understand shame and recognize what messages and expectations trigger shame for them. 2. Practice critical awareness… 3. Reach out and share their stories with people they trust. 4. Speak shame – they use the word shame…and ask for what they need.” (page 234). Those people also have figured out how to deal constructively with criticism. They have been able to determine whose opinions should matter in their lives, and listen well to those opinions from a position of appropriate vulnerability. On the other hand, they screened out the input of those who deliver criticism from the “cheap seats” (page 245).
Brown finishes by describing the final piece of the rising strong process: The Revolution. This stage requires that we live out what we’ve learned in the process of rumbling in our stories. In order to live this out, Brown contends that we must stay curious and dig into our SFDs “to unlock the fears and doubts that get in the way of our wholeheartedness” (page 255).
A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix – Edwin Friedman:
In this book, Friedman contends that: “If you want your child, spouse, client or boss to shape up, stay connected while changing yourself rather than trying to fix them” (page ix). A person who wishes to lead must concentrate on his or her own “presence and being” (page 4). Friedman views leadership more as an emotional process than a technique to be applied or “cognitive phenomenon” (page 13). He organizes the treatment of the subjects in this book in a kind of “parallel process” in which he deals with different aspects of the essence of his thinking almost simultaneously. After working through the introduction and first two chapters, a reader could easily skip around throughout the remainder of the book without losing a sense of what Friedman develops elsewhere.
In this first section of the book (intro and first two chapters) Friedman summarizes what he views as the significant problems facing our American society in the current context. He begins by summarizing his belief that our society suffers from a lack of imagination which contributes to our aversion to risk. Central to this contention is a belief that imagination is more of an emotional phenomenon. The barriers we face to engaging an imaginative response to the situations we encounter are more emotional that mental. Driving much of this lack of imagination is the chronic anxiety between people. Those characterized by this anxiety exhibit reactivity to both people and events. They are outward focused rather than inward focused. Coupled with this tendency toward reactivity, anxious people and groups display a herding instinct that seeks to quash the differentiation in healthy individuals who resist the reactivity of the group. Both the reactivity and herding often serve the purpose of feeding blame displacement onto outside persons or issues in an attempt to search for a quick fix to perceived problems.
Next, Friedman summarizes the problems associated with our over-reliance on data. He asserts that it is much more important to be decisive given the best data reasonably available than to obsessively strain for more data. Most importantly, we must be aware that “the brain’s method of processing data always includes emotional variables” (page 117). The entire self is involved in the thinking process. On top of this, the effectiveness of our communication “depends on the emotional variables of direction, distance, and anxiety” (page 128).
Friedman follows this discussion by delivering his opinions regarding empathy and empathy’s destructive characteristics in our world. He maintains that our “social regression has too often perverted the use of empathy into a disguise for anxiety, a rationalization for the failure to define a position, and a power tool in the hands of the ‘sensitive’” (page 133). He is concerned that the desire in our society to exhibit empathy has caused many to avoid making the hard choices in relationships that cause pain. This reticence of leaders to choose the difficult road that causes temporary pain often feeds into the tendency of those more reactive members of groups to continue along a path lacking self-regulation. Boundaries become ill-defined or non-existent. Friedman believes that “the function of a leader within any institution [is] to provide that [needed] regulation through his or her non-anxious, self-defined presence” (page 151). Being self-differentiated is critical to effective leadership.
Friedman then explores the question, how can we “value, indeed treasure and preserve self without worrying that [we] are being narcissistic or autocratic” (page 174). He shows that this question has become complicated by highlighting how simply adding “ish” to the word “self” in English turns the word into a pejorative term (in contrast to adding “ish” to other words – i.e. pinkish, greenish, etc.). The word “self” owns a level of ambiguity that can be seen in the other contradictory ways it is used when combined with other words (self-explanatory, self-evident, self-expression, self-appointed, self-seeking, – yielding a real mixture of positive and negative connotations).
Friedman defines self-differentiation as “taking the maximum responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny rather than blaming others or the context…[it] is an emotional concept, not a cerebral one” (page 183). It has less to do with behavior, and more to do with a person’s emotional being. A person in this emotional position “has the capacity to get outside the emotional state” they are in, and has a “willingness to be exposed and vulnerable” while persisting in the face of external resistance (page 188). This enables a leader to understand his or her self and affect the emotional system within which he or she is located, even when facing inevitable sabotage.
Finally, Friedman addresses what he refers to as “emotional triangles.” According to Friedman, the building blocks for all interpersonal relationships are emotional triangles. These triangles represent how the relationship between any two people, or a person and their symptoms are a function of a “third person, relationship, or issue” that is between them. These triangles have both positive and negative effects on leaders. On the negative side, they can serve to trap a person in unclear or unhealthy relationships that are difficult to perceive. On the positive side, when they are clearly identified, a leader can begin to map out a path forward to address the problems. Friedman believes “Almost every issue of leadership and the difficulties that accompany it can be framed in terms of emotional triangles” (page 206). The characteristics inherent in all emotional triangles are: they are self-organizing; they are perpetuated by distance; and, they tend to be perverse (page 213).
Friedman takes care to flesh out these characteristics. By self-organizing, Friedman means, they have their own sense of balance between the parties that, when thrown off, will change the dynamics of the relationship. The “distance” aspect of triangles has the effect of inhibiting openness, directness, and intimacy in the parties involved. To minimize the negative effects of triangles good leaders seek to close the distance in triangles (or all other relationships) while remaining well self-differentiated. By identifying most triangles as “perverse,” Friedman means that it is “useless” to will others to change or to try to get others to change in a direct manner. Instead, through the non-anxious presence of a leader “being rooted in that leader’s own sense of self,” emotional relationships and systems can begin to change for the better. When leaders employ more indirect means – especially working on their personal change, those leaders become more effective.
Appreciation and Strengths:
Each book, in one form or another, deals with the importance of narrative and its relationship to self-deception. While doing this, they all rely on powerful stories to bring their point home to the reader. Each shows, more than tells, the importance of crafting a truthful narrative if we are to function well when engaging life’s difficulties during the process of leading self and others. And yet, each book owns particular strengths that rise above the other two when engaging the topic of narrative. Arbinger’s authors provide very compelling stories that illustrate the destructive nature of being stuck “in the box,” as well as the powerfully positive multiplier effects that come when people escape “the box” to tell the truth. Likewise, through the use of a series of stories, Brown shows clearly and forcefully, the importance of revising our perceptions of the narratives in which we find ourselves. She provides a process for evaluating those narratives in terms of both their accuracy and how they affect us. She also delivers useful prescriptions for building trusting relationships that mirror a helpful virtues list. Finally, Friedman, through his analysis of the stories associated with the great explorers in American history, provides compelling examples of how these historical figures were affected by the controlling narrative in their world; or, how in some instances they changed that narrative.
In addition, each of the authors takes a very different approach to, or provides a varied perspective on, distinct issues that these books treat. For instance, the authors from The Arbinger Institute seem to have a much more optimistic perspective about the ability and desire of people in general to want to, or to actually do the correct thing in a given circumstance. They seem to make the assumption that people often know what the right thing to do is; but, through “self-betrayal” do not do it. On the other hand, both Brown and Friedman seem to have a more pessimistic (realistic?) perspective on people naturally having the internal moral compass to know what it is right to do, or to want to do it. Brown in particular seems to recognize the importance of training in virtues and habits that are necessary to engage in correct or helpful behavior. She also makes it very clear that dealing with criticism is important; but who we allow to deliver criticism, and how we hear that criticism is equally important. On the other hand, Friedman contends that a sense of playfulness is often critically helpful in shifting relationships from a negative position to a more positive place.
Brown also seems to recognize the pain and suffering involved in the process of coming to terms with what needs to change in our lives, and the consequences of making difficult decisions in both our personal and professional relationships. She truly sees how hard the “rumbling” with our stories can be, and how complicated the struggle to revise the stories we tell ourselves often is. Though each author seems to give a strong, clear nod to the importance of the emotional processes inherent in any necessary change work that people do to improve relationships, Brown seems to have mapped out more of the details of what we must face in order to make those changes.
Finally, we see one of the biggest differences in how Friedman defines and describes empathy in comparison with Brown. Friedman views society’s approach to empathy as one of the major reasons for the social regression in America. In our pursuit of a more empathic perspective on our world, he thinks we have been trapped into avoiding the painful decisions that would heal our relationships. He also thinks an over-emphasis on empathy has served to erode healthy, personal boundaries that are critical to high functioning relationships. Brown, on the other hand, affirms the importance of empathy in helping us to tell our stories well when constructing truthful narratives that bring clarity to the important decisions we make. At points in his book Friedman seems to recognize the importance of empathy. However, at other times he seems to be frustrated by his view of our struggle in the pursuit of empathy. He believes this pursuit has clouded our thinking and contributed to a “failure of nerve” in the face of a need for clear decisions. In my opinion, Friedman’s frustration could have been better acknowledged without seeming to dump nearly all expressions of empathy into the same bath and throwing all of it out with the water in an exasperated fury.
Todd Rivetti 