Power Energy Leadership

Most of what we know is someone’s opinion. In fact, most of what we know is someone else’s opinion. I’m reading a fascinating biography on Mary Queen of Scots and although the author is a well known English historian and has researched her subject thoroughly, most of what she writes is her interpretation of what few unarguable facts remain of her subject’s life. It turns out most of modern life works the same way. Unless we are subject matter experts in a pure science such as mathematics or biology, most of what we know is our own or someone else’s opinion. We give lip service to innovation, but we have no idea how to begin with something as simple as innovating how we know what we know.

This applies most basically and most powerfully to the questions of who we are and why we do what we do. Most of us define who we are in terms of our current and past roles. “I am business owner or executive, life partner, parent, child, friend.” These are indeed facts, but what they actually say about us are opinions. What does it say about us that we are an executive at Company X? That we are in a relationship with Person Y? That we are the child of These Parents? We aren’t always sure what it says, and often the meaning doesn’t carry any true connection to who we are inside. That’s because what it says is someone else’s words imbued with someone else’s meaning.

Defining “Who am I?” can be one of the most liberating and empowering exercises we ever engage with. Claiming our attributes and characteristics, our preferences and strengths, reframing what we once saw as negative into positive — all of these activities clarify areas of our lives and our work where once there was vague cloudiness. We gain focus and motivation, definition, power, and new frames from which to lead and empower others.

Who are you really? If you stop listening to the opinions of others, and even your own old mantras about roles and positions, who are you? What are the implications for fully claiming that identity? What one action can you take this week to wean yourself off the opinions of others and begin to claim the leader you really are?

Recent research in neuro-psychology includes the discovery of certain movement neurons which are activated when we observe others making movements we recognize from our own experience. These neurons are called “mirror neurons” and they are so powerfully triggered that to some part of our brains it is as if we actually made the movement ourselves.

Researchers happened on these neurons by accident and did not immediately recognize the full implications. Only after many observations in separate and unrelated experiments did they put together the correlating data and make sense of what they had. The full discovery ignited great excitement in the worlds of psychology and related areas of human behavioral study.

Here’s where it matters for our purposes: we make movements large and small every day. And they have impacts large and small on everyone around us, creating sympathetic and perhaps not-so-sympathetic reactions in others which may not even make sense to those who experience the reactions. For example, if you see me lift my coffee mug and take a sip, you don’t have to move a muscle to know exactly what I am experiencing at every point along the way. If you like coffee, you’ll enjoy that experience, creating a shared experience of pleasure.

If I furrow my brow in anger and draw my lips down in disapproval, you also know what I am experiencing in that moment without you having to be angry or disapproving yourself. And you will most likely not enjoy that experience, perhaps drawing away from me, or even expressing your own anger and disapproval to someone else if you connected deeply to your mirrored experience of anger and disapproval.

Everything we experience is put through our personal set of filters. So there is a great deal of room for error as we rely on our mirror neurons for input. Unfortunately, the part of the brain that processes our reaction to the movements and events triggered by the mirror neurons isn’t aware of those filters and processes the observation and movement data very quickly, unaware that the interpretations may be flawed. So most of the time before we have had the opportunity to become aware of our filters we have already assessed the incoming data and responded as if we KNEW what we were observing to be true based on the data alone.

Using the brow furrowing example, I might make that movement and accompany it with a grimace. Your mirror neurons and your filters interpret that as anger and you have an internal reaction to that, pulling away from me and perhaps, in the extreme, feeling the beginning of anger within you. However, I might merely be concentrating fiercely on a task that I find unpleasant or difficult. Particularly if I combine the brow furrowing and grimace with any kind of verbal exchange that includes tightness in my voice, you may still interpret this concentration as anger, most especially if you are highly sensitive to anger for any reason based on your past experiences.

One of the goals of increasing our self awareness is to increase the gap time between incoming data and response. We desire an increased gap time to allow us the opportunity to examine our filters and choose to engage with or without them in place. This requires practice and patience.

Several questions help us make good use of the discovery of mirror neurons: What data am I putting out for others to mirror? What impact is it having on them? What data am I taking in from others? How are my personal filters engaged to possibly alter my perceptions of that data? What are my default tendencies in response to that data? How can I increase my gap time?

mirror neurons, awareness, reactions, filters, default tendencies, choice

From time to time my son surprises me with his conceptual understanding of what I do as a coach. Just this week he quoted The Magic School Bus series’ Ms. Frizzle (the bus driver) as a way of explaining what I do. Apparently Ms. Frizzle tells her student riders to “make mistakes, get messy and be free!” My son thinks this is what I do. And how right he is!

For readers of my blog, this will come as no surprise. “Make mistakes” has been an ongoing theme here. “Get messy” is a result of making mistakes, exploring possibilities, letting go of predicting unpredictable outcomes and allowing the unknown in.

I’m teaching a class called “Recovering Your Creativity” for Fairfax County Public Schools Adult and Community Education. Just these two concepts of making mistakes and getting messy are enough to cover an entire semester. The fear of getting it wrong and making it ugly in some way freezes everyone’s creative juices to ice. It is amazing to me and wonderfully exciting to see what the power of granting permission can do for a group of hungry adults. It is not that they lack ability. They simply lack permission.

Every grade schooler who has read any of the The Magic School Bus (by Joanna Cole) books has experienced this permission — even if only vicariously through the book itself. Go ahead, give yourself permission to make some mistakes and be messy. See what it is like to truly be free. Your leadership will become instantly more energetic, powerful and compelling.

mistakes, freedom, permission, leadership, coaching, creativity, possibilities