Lead yourself

Leadership and self-knowledge.

By accepting the ideas, reasons or preferences of others, many of us feel as if we have lost something, as if our status has diminished, and our natural response is to take a stand against them, to fight against their reasons, sometimes even knowing that we are wrong.

At work, our direct collaborator or our boss suggests a procedure different from the one we had previously assumed and, without analyzing the reasons, we reject it. We easily find the arguments that justify our refusal and, most of the time, we convince them. Our Conditioned Tendency also provides us with the mental speed and loquacity necessary for this.

In our social/family life, our friends or our partner suggest a restaurant for us to go to for dinner. We immediately have a better idea. Another restaurant that “we know they will like better.” We manipulate, if necessary. We can’t say yes, we have to get our way. Our need for control prevails over the opportunity to make room for something different.

We are those who, as an adaptive pattern, strategically organize ourselves “against the grain.”

Others of us readily agree to someone else’s idea, opinion, or proposal. We say yes even before we have heard the whole argument, eager to join in and please, wanting to be accepted and liked. We agree, even when that acceptance may entail an extra effort. We are unable to refuse to stay an extra hour at the office when a colleague asks us to or an urgent task requires it, and we end up assuming obligations and responsibilities that belong to others. We need to be clearly liked and accepted. This need prevails even over our own interest. We cannot say no, and our contribution, our ideas or desires rarely end up prevailing or are recognized as our own.

We are those who, as an adaptive pattern, strategically organize ourselves “in favor.”

Finally, there are those of us who avoid confrontation, even physically escaping. When faced with any difficult situation or serious conversation, we find the perfect subterfuge to avoid being there at all. We enter a meeting with our cell phone in our hand and we are practically with one foot outside the room the whole time. We always have a joke to divert attention, ready for critical moments. We delay making significant decisions at work or in the family until the situations “resolve themselves.” We avoid meetings with neighbors and fool ourselves into believing that we are the ones who choose who we want to be with, even though, if we are not there, others end up making decisions that affect us and may be contrary to our interests.

Our need to stay out of things, to not take responsibility or take sides, prevails, and in doing so we give up our decision-making space or disappoint the expectations placed on us. We are incapable of saying yes or no.

We are those who, as an adaptive pattern, strategically organize ourselves “on the run.”

These conditioned tendencies (against, for, and away), identified by Dr. Richard Strozzi-Heckler and explored in the leadership development programs delivered by the Strozzi Institute in California and through Green Light GO in Europe, are part of who we are and constitute the adaptive response that our autonomic nervous system has developed to move us toward safety in the face of any situation that our nervous system interprets as a threat or challenge.

Of course, there is a difference between “nudging” to take the lead and being a tyrant. Between always having a kind word ready and developing an attitude of permanent submission, or between intentionally being distracted in order to skip certain commitments and radically refusing to assume them.

We are talking about tendencies around which we organize our personality and which can hardly be optimized from our cognitive brain. Their opportunity or inopportuneness is what would mark whether they are functional or not, but even the weighting of the response seems difficult to regulate through a cognitive process. As Dr. Stephen Porges, professor of the Department of Psychiatry and Director of the Brain-Body Center at the University of Illinois in Chicago, author of the Polyvagal Theory, which explains this work from neuroscience, points out :

“Before our brain interprets an incident that poses a challenge to our safety, our autonomic nervous system has already analyzed and formulated a response.”
S. Porges
Polyvagal theory

That is, our Conditioned Tendency “chooses for us” and if we occupy leadership positions this will have an impact.

For example, since ancient times we have placed the responsibility of leading armies, countries or, more recently, organizations, on people with “counter-reaction” response patterns. Very good at control, resource management and defense of boundaries and interests, they face with worse results the challenge of a changing and hyper-connected world in which the main competitive advantage is, more than ever, innovation.

Promoting intrapreneurship, encouraging creativity and retaining talent will be a real challenge for a leader whose response pattern is organized “against the grain” and who has not learned to regulate his nervous system and develop mechanisms to avoid his Conditioned Tendency when necessary.

The same will happen with a leader whose Conditioned Tendency is to position himself “in favor” and who lacks the ability to generate an action different from that which would lead him to the first response of his autonomic nervous system. He will give a lot of space to individual contribution, to input and to external ideas, but he will also easily give in to proposals and solutions, without being fully convinced. He will have easy negotiations with whom he will make friends, but it will be difficult for him to reconcile the results of these with the objectives.

And those who react “on the run” without having developed the ability to act differently from their Conditioned Tendency may create disjointed teams that suffer the consequences of a lack of communication and clarity in objectives and procedures. Teams or human groups lacking purpose and with little personal involvement.

Know yourself

This was the only visible phrase, carved on the lintel of the entrance door of the Oracle of Delphi, one of the great centers of divination and forecasting of classical antiquity. The knowledge of one’s own Conditioned Tendency, the sensation, the emotion and the subsequent action, as it occurs in real time, is the fundamental preliminary step of the Strozzi Institute’s Embodied Leadership development program.

Only after we have mapped what is happening and where it is happening so that we can act in a certain way, will we be prepared to choose to carry out new actions and be able to expand our range of response, in real time.

To achieve this,

• In the Dojo (training place) we will develop impact practices that will facilitate self-observation and evaluation of our Conditioned Tendency.
• We will investigate our YES and our NO from acceptance and rejection, as essential acts of leadership and along with this, the internal narratives that sustain our convictions and desires.
• We will study the elements necessary for somatic evaluation and self-evaluation from the three dimensions of our anatomy (length, width and depth) and how they relate to the fundamental needs of the human being (dignity, belonging and security).
• We will declare our fourth somatic dimension: our purpose.

The next 4-day “Embodied Transformation” module to be taught in Europe will take place from 30 September to 2 October in a residential format, at the historic Masía Can Julià.

More information here

Sergio Blancafort.
Academic Director GLG.