S4:E5 Self Reflection

This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Sy Wakeman. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the No Ego Podcast. Sy Wakeman here. It is season 4 and I am flying solo for the first part of this season. With a few bonus episodes where I bring some of my favorite teachers on, but mostly flying solo because I want to talk to you about the next level of reality-based leadership, no ego leadership, leadership that is really coming out of higher levels of consciousness. I think it's time that we absolutely redefine what leadership is and really focus on evolving ourselves as leaders. that we can evolve our team. And that's going to take some new competencies, my friends. And one of the big competencies I talk about, if you want to evolve as an individual, is self-reflection and evolution. And if you want to be a great leader, you've got to get incredibly skilled at leading more self-reflection, more sense-making as a mentor. So that's what we're going to talk about today. leading self-reflection and developing people through what I call sense-making mentoring, helping folks really notice how they feel, how they respond, notice how that works for them, understand in the moment how to stop the conversation they're currently having, perhaps one that's exhausting them, starting a new conversation, toggling Up from low self to high self and beginning again from a whole different view of the world, a whole different level of consciousness, a whole different level of accountability, and how to lead that ego bypass. And in reality-based leadership, we use what we call an ego bypass to get from low self to high self, ourselves and other people. And one of the most profound ways to do that the one that works the best is all about self-reflection. And sensemaking mentoring is taking self-reflection and moving it beyond that to contemplation, to noticing your own response, how that response works for you, understanding by using contemplation what your red threads are, what your patterns are, what your themes are in your life, and really integrating your experiences and your learning and forging it into wisdom. And with that integration, really making sense of how you tend to move through the world and how you could move through the world differently, it will help with that word I use a lot, your own evolution. So the question I'm going to ask you today is, how would Your work life, how would your results, how would the work life and environment that you create with your team members be different if you led more self-reflection, if you focus more of your time and energy on sense-making mentoring with your team? Now, as I get into this, I want to start out a bit by clarifying Holding space for the human experience of feelings and entertaining, allowing, passively waiting for venting to stop. I want to help you understand the difference between venting and feeling. So feeling is an embodied experience. It is a more physical reaction to the experience at hand, and it's an internal experience. And a lot of people are really out of touch with their own feelings. And a lot of people have externalized or intellectualized their feelings, as I've talked about in other podcasts, and intellectualize a feeling into a grievance or intellectualize a feeling into a thought and then gone on to really outsource their emotional experience. They have come to believe that their feelings are caused by things external to them that they're at the mercy of their circumstances, or that their general level of contentment has to do with what's happening around them and the behavior of others. And you'll even hear them say things like, he made me so angry. And if you've been in therapy for even a single session, you'll know that we counselors say, well, back up. You felt that way. Let's take away that ex— external attribution. Let's not, let's not outsource your experiential, your, your emotional experience by saying he made you feel that way. He acted, you felt. Separate those out, because then you can start to find these really small portals that you can exercise what we call agency or accountability or choice. So when I talk, I talk a lot about Moving people beyond venting. And some people take that as, oh my gosh, I'm just not going to listen to any experience, especially if it's emotional, from any of my team members. And feeling is, like I said, that physical experience, physically emotional spiritual combo experience. And it can be boiled down into really simple form: mad, glad, sad, or scared. It can be Usually stated in a sentence. There's very little story around it. And the best thing to do with a feeling is to get out of your intellect, out of your mind, out of your thinking, and into your body with breath to experience it and notice the feeling, because the feelings come with great information. And we've got to get more practiced at that. People tend to feel any feeling and then either want to numb it or Blame it on somebody else, or intellectualize it, as I said, or get into a grievance and grievance around it. And feeling is a vocabulary I think we have to reteach many of the people that work for us. Because when I ask people, "How are you feeling?" They usually say, "I'm super busy." They tell me kind of their state or the qualities of their external environment instead of really. Being able to not just identify mad, glad, sad, or scared— that's the starting point— but to identify beyond that what their emotional experience is. They usually want to tell you what happened or justify, I'm angry because, instead of just owning the feeling that they're having. And many of our certified facilitators are telling me, as they're working to help people notice Their own emotional experiences. They've actually had to download feelings charts so that people can up their vocabulary and describe more accurately what they're actually experiencing from an emotional standpoint. So it's a skill set that many people around us have not used in a while, and it's a mission I'm kind of on. When I ask people, how are you feeling? They usually hear, how are you doing? And they go through through and tell me kind of their current state of affairs rather than just take a breath, go inside, and notice how one's feeling. Now, a feeling is just, as I said, this, this identification of my emotional state. Venting is different. Venting is the story we create to justify the feeling and to many times keep the feeling alive, and to revisit the feeling and give it energy. It's a story we tell over and over in our heads. And a lot of times, it's that story that can drive further emotional experiences rather than breathing and sitting and experiencing can dissipate those feelings. And so we keep ourselves kind of revved up. So the example I use to help people understand the difference is let's say that Alex comes into my office and says, Sai, I'm super frustrated. I'm like, gosh, you appear and sound very frustrated. And then I ask for the context. Like, that was just one sentence. That's his feeling. And I asked for a bit of context. And he says, Sarah didn't give me the information I needed on time today. So I Will need to work late to finalize my reports that are due to the client tomorrow. No drama. He just reported what happened. Now that's the feeling, that's the context. What I can offer him is empathy. I can hold space for and recognize and see him and acknowledge and affirm, yes, that sounds like that could be Frustrating for you. After empathy then is the call to greatness. So given this current happening, what would great look like? How can you respond? What are you thinking of doing to accomplish what you've committed, right? It's that call to greatness that says, given the circumstances, how can you still be great? And the Dalai Lama talks about— and I love this model— that basically Suffering is optional. If you're experiencing pain— pain happens. That's frustrating for many of us to be delayed when we had plans for the evening. It's a pretty common human experience to experience frustration. You have really 2 choices. You can step up. If you can have impact, then go impact it. And if you can't and you don't want to suffer, then radically accept it. And move on. Understand it's the way of your current world and love what is, as Byron Katie talks about. Many people seek out a third option, which is, I'm not going to step up in impact, I'm not going to radically accept. I want a third option, which is basically stay and complain about it, stay and vent. And third options are where suffering happens because they're options that are at odds with reality. You either see your reality for what it is and step up and have impact if you find a way to do that, or you accept the current reality and be the connector between an unpreferred reality and a desired different future state. So I would say to Alex, I understand that you're frustrated. If you were great right now, what's something you could do that if not for today, in the future would have impact? And he could brainstorm ideas. I could put a notice on her calendar so that she sees a reminder a few days ahead of the monthly due date. Fantastic. I'm like, awesome, Alex, that's a great idea. So go do that. And that's where you have to look out for the ego making a play, because what comes next to him perhaps is like, well, but I shouldn't have to take care of her calendar for her and put reminders. She should just remember. And my response is later oftentimes is, oh my gosh, you were almost great. Your ego came playing. And so if you don't want to step up, and many people won't, they will say, I don't want to have that conversation, or already know how it will turn out, even though they don't. I'll say, okay, well, can you extend benefit of the doubt, mercy, tolerance? It's a form of radical exception, or accepting. And you might say, you know, gosh, absolutely. There are times that I run behind. I know I inconvenience team members. And so this is one of those times, I guess I'm just repaying my debt to the team. I've been bailed out before. I can just accept it. I'm glad to step up and do what I need to do to still make the deadline. And I test that as well because oftentimes we say those words, but we don't perform in a way aligned with those words. So I'll say, perfect, then what else do you want to talk about? I will try and move the topic to another subject. And I see if people can actually let it go. Impact it or let it go. Otherwise you will suffer. And that's where Alex may respond, but wait a minute, she shouldn't get away with it. And I can then say, oh, we aren't letting it go. So do you want to step up and impact it? No, I shouldn't have to. Do you want to radically let it go? But she shouldn't get away with it. Now we're in that third option. And the difference between I'm frustrated getting the data I needed late becomes I'm frustrated, and let me tell you a story. She does this crap on purpose, and it's because she doesn't respect my position in the company. And it goes back to 1989 when we merged and she got a different title than mine. And this is her way to make me look bad in front of the client, and she's trying to discredit me. All of that are things I can't possibly know for sure. They're assignment of motive. They are Projections into the future. They are judgments about how their team member is operating or what their character is like, none of which— if you did the edit your story exercise where you go through and you write all that down and you scrutinize it for what you can possibly know for sure— none of that would hold up in the light of day. But it's the story that the ego uses to keep The feeling alive to justify not moving back to a state of contentment through impact or acceptance, but to dwell and focus on the insult and to keep it alive. Maybe her forgetting to give you data would cost you an hour of time. You're the one who gave it the next 3 hours. It gets into kind of like whose crime is Bigger. And this is the difference between a feeling about what happened and being affirmed, acknowledged, empathized with. Gosh, that sounds like it is frustrating. And when we as leaders let people go into venting, the venting you can tell is how people want to keep insults alive or make insults out of something that there just isn't any insult in. No one did this on purpose. This was Just the happenings of the day. And I often will find people wanting to keep it alive for days. They'll step back and they'll go, and I just saw her in the hallway and she had a smile on her face and she doesn't even feel guilty about it. And then 3 days later it's like, well, you know, part of this, I just was thinking about it and figured out this is why she does what she does. And I just want you to, to notice how little self-reflection may be going on. In your team. Alex reminded me of a conversation we had recently, or actually he reminded me recently of a conversation we'd had. And self-reflection, we know, is the foundation of not only accountability, but the, the fact that accountability is highly correlated to one's happiness and state of contentment. Self-reflection is what drives all of that. And so if you wanted accountability, if you wanted engagement in a content team, it would seem that You would want to spend a great deal of time in self-reflection. It is just the, the proven cycle of how to produce accountability and engagement on your team. And yet when we ask people, how much time do you and your team spend in self-reflection? The answer is usually zero, nada. And so that's why the topic of this podcast for me is all about helping people Move into self-reflection and out of venting. And so I want to clarify feeling versus venting so that you could hold space for people's experiences, but facilitate it in a way that you invite them to be very clean about their experience and to own their continued experience from that point forward, and to even be able to— Notice and make sense of the experience so they understand how much has to do with the present situation and how much they bring in with them from the past and how much of the current reaction is about projection into the future. We've got to start as leaders developing the competencies we need to help people unpack and integrate and understand their own experiences, their responses, their actions versus their success in getting their needs met and, and achieving their goals. We are doing so little self-reflection that so many people are, as I said, outsourcing their emotional experience, that there really isn't going to be a sustainable way to perfect people's experiences to the point where they're engaged and able to do good work, let alone— Grow, develop, and evolve into happy human beings doing meaningful work and achieving their own purpose, doing their best work. So it's important that people understand and have fluency in feeling their feelings because feelings do have really good information. And the goal needs to be to experience them, um, To the fullest extent, but to understand that when feelings are out of proportion to current happenings, that there's something more than just the feeling of the current moment happening. So it's important for leaders to be able to hold space so that people can share their feelings. But with sharing comes ownership. I am angry. And when I sit with that anger, it tells me that I need to be more honest when agreeing to work I wasn't interested in, or I need to be better at setting boundaries. It's mining feelings for information on where I need to grow and develop next, or where I need to ask directly for support, or where I need to increase my own skill set or change my approach or make a change in my current situation because I prefer something different. So it's so important that we can hold space for people to share their experience. And it's important that individuals learn to self-regulate and to take ownership for their own experiences and their own feelings. As I said before, like, too many people enter work and they outsource their emotional experience to external factors. And we encourage it. We believe people leave their jobs because of a poor leader. And instead of, I left my job before I could grow and develop into speaking directly and honestly with my leader about what I need, or before I could develop the skill set to be able to not take on another person's anger and internalize it and feel bad about myself in my current role. So there's a whole process that I don't want people to believe that feelings can just be had all over work. That's unregulated feelings, but that feelings can be acknowledged and that people can be helped to really use self-reflection in the moment, which focuses the energy of that individual internally, and it stops the projection, that outsourcing I talked about, of their experience. It's to be able to notice where the experience is and what their experience is, and then to feel that experience and to process it in a way that is a conscious attributing while avoiding kind of what I call typical attribution bias. So it is owning what is Mine and what is the result of my lifestyle, my choices, my willingness to align with the direction of the organization—all those factors—it's it's mine that I'm gonna own, and I'm gonna stop thinking and attributing my state of well-being to the behavior of another or to. A dependency on whether things work out as I prefer. And I'm going to be able to maintain a state of contentment independent of these short-term happenings of the day, the behaviors of others, the willingness of others to do as I've requested. So what happens so often is a great deal of one's experience of their current moment is contaminated with unprocessed experiences of their past, where they apply the past onto the present. It's contaminated with the projection of this experience into the future. And all of these things are fear-based and they're all works of the ego. You know, people are so quick when I ask them about their engagement to tell me that they're disengaged because of something in their external environment. I ask them how they're doing and they reply that they're super busy. Um, when I ask, I guess, how they're feeling and they reply that they're feeling stressed because they're busy, instead of really going inside and saying, you know what, I'm feeling pretty grateful today and I have a full schedule. We really need people to start getting more As I said, fluent in the ability to identify their feelings, but notice the choices they make, not ones they were forced to make, but the ones that they make in how they move through those feelings and then respond into the world. True maturity is really this ability to maintain A container that houses one's total experience. And the container needs to be large enough to hold all of what's happening in life with some additional things: perspective, hope for the future, agency, understanding of one's own impact. It's— when I look at happiness or contentment, It is not about, I can be happy when things go my way or nothing painful happens in my life. Happiness is about having a container big enough for multiple things to be true at the same time, bigger than the current experience, bigger than the short-term kind of perspective that we're taking. One of my favorite poets and writers, Mark Nepo, who wrote The Book of Awakening, which is a great daily reflection Um, a book of reflections. He talks recently about if you can have a container big enough to know that there is still water in the world even when you're thirsty, that a container that's big enough to really be convinced that there's still love even when you're lonely, there's still peace even when you're suffering. It's the ability to hold possibility. Mm-hmm. And future and perspective beyond the present moment. It's the ability to maintain hope in light of what's currently happening. It's a, a place to put the current so that it is one of many data points, not the determining data point, not the one that is going to be predictive of your state of being. And as leaders, I think a big job for us is to help people develop bigger containers. That's what sense-making mentoring is, is helping you take your current experience and make sense of it and place it into a container of your larger life. See where your themes are, where those red threads are that run through any experience. If you are having similar experiences, even in different relationships and different workplaces, the common denominator of those experiences is you. And at some point, we have to stop believing that these things are happening to us as if we have nothing to do with it and start to realize the ways in which we invite these things into our lives, the lessons, the invitations, the experiences are making to us to grow and evolve. And as I think about modern leadership, this sensemaking mentoring is such a key competency. And we leaders need to be carriers of hope. We need to not discount what one's going through, but we need to help them put it into a bigger container after they express it so that they can find ways in which they can find their own agency, their own perspective, that they can maintain hope even when things are challenging, that they can show up resilient. Because the only thing that powers our resilience at times is that we've got faith bigger than our fears, that Part of resilience is I'm willing to turn towards the scary and the hard. And that fuel that helps me turn towards that is that I have a big container of faith, but I also have mined my past experiences and made sense of them to know that I have faced hard things in the past and have persevered and have some skill sets and some strategies and techniques to make that happen. So these Containers have to be big enough to house current experiences with perspective, with hope, with accountability, agency, and also with confidence that we've developed strong, positive relationships that can hold this experience. So much of our container is our relationships with other people, and we put very little insistence when we're working with people's development that they need to fix broken relationships, they need to invest in, they need to take risks, they need to not just wait for someone to be trustworthy but to work at building trust by working through conflict and hard things. There's so many ways leaders over-function. They take a conflict and go resolve it For someone so that we keep their containers really small. And as leaders, I hope this is making sense to you out there. We've got to help people really grow their containers, and we've got to help them understand that the state of their relationships with their teammates, with people in their profession, in their industry, that building positive relationships helps expand the container because my individual container may not be able to impact the current situation. But collectively, we can be genius. As Einstein says, together we are genius. It's that a type of faith that I know I can team source and, and have confidence in the abilities of the us together. And so when you think about people's emotional maturity right now and the ability to not only self-regulate but be responsible for their own levels of contentment and choices to engage if they are simply connecting what's happening in the external world and their interpretation of whether they prefer that or not, and that determines their experience of whether it's happiness or contentment, that is not sustainable. And it really is a prescription for people to feel unfulfilled and unhappy a lot of the time. And so instead of working on engagement through buying people's love through changing external circumstances— and if you have some horrendous circumstances, change it, but most of you don't— we need to help people develop the capacity to be well and maintain their sense of well-being in bigger arenas with a lot more external challenges going on in their life. So helping people know that their current experience is small and all that is around them is bigger, and that we can play a much grander role in co-creation of our experience and ultimately how All this plays out is just a key piece of a leader. And I think we not only do we overmanage, but I think because we're not doing this for ourselves in our own evolution, we're not able to lead people to this level. And you have to bear with me on this podcast. It's free. I'm talking out loud, trying to find language and verbiage for this. This state of modern leadership that I just really believe we need to help people develop the skills to evolve into. If you listen to me a lot, you know I love Byron Katie's work and her most recent use of the language of projection. And she basically says, like, if you're stressed or if your feelings are out of proportion, to what you're experiencing, right? They aren't moderate. They aren't self-regulated. They aren't small drops in a big container. That if you're feeling stressed, there could be a really simple explanation. And the language she uses, I just love. If you're stressed, here's the simple explanation. You're just in a place that is simply known as Not now. And that anytime you're in the not now, meaning the past or the future, you will be stressed. It's fear-based. It's not related or accurately correlated to the present moment. Because when you're in the now, if you're really in the now, you're well supported. You have all you need in this moment. You're fine if you really connect in. The only time you're not fine is when you Revisit the past or you go into the future, anytime you enter the land— and I just love this language that she uses called the not now— is where all your difficulties really start. So when you're in the now, you're thriving, you're right where you need to be, you're present, you're connected in the moment to that which you are embodying. You're connected to your best self, and you're able to connect to the best in others. And you're in that zone beyond ego, that field that Rumi talks about when he wrote that beautiful verse, out beyond the ideas of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field, I will meet you there. Modern leadership is all about bypassing the work of the ego that keeps us very fear-based, because it carries with us all of the past, and it projects very scary stories onto the future. And And it takes us out of the now where all is just fine. The only way it can keep us scared and externally identified and doing its bidding really is to not have us experience the present moment. All of you have had the moment where you're in the zone, time slowed down, you just felt inspired, you felt like the top of your head opened up and everything you needed just was like channeled in. Whatever it is that you love, that you were born to do, when you are in that zone, you are not worried about not having what you need or not being appreciated or not being promoted, or you are just lost in creating and co-creating that which you're supposed to be involved in. And all spiritual leaders talk about this. field beyond ego, or this ability to really be present in the moment. Um, you know, Jesus talked about in the Bible being in this world and not of this world at the same time, with emphasis on being. So being in the world but understanding this isn't it. You're not just this, this tiny speck, like you're You're in this world, but you're not of this physical, external, identified world. This isn't to be what defines you. And so many philosophers just continue to call us to be in this world but not controlled by this world. And that is the core competency that we need if we love our teams, to be working on with our teams so that they can come to understand that they're— when they're in the now, they're part of and connected to a far bigger world with far more abundance than ever imagined than the external world. That whatever they're experiencing is small compared to what's possible, what's true, what is. It's hard to explain in leadership terms, but it's this higher-level work that we're being called to do right now in the field of leadership. And we've really limited ourselves, I think, in some constraints. There seems to be these levels of learning and development and growth that we're called to facilitate in the workplace. And one of the things that happened— and I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point it happened— that we divided out personal development from professional development. And we said, you know what, we can only really facilitate professional development, the personal development gets into somebody's private life and, and crosses some line, as if we can separate out the human from the skill set. And so when people, you know, talk to me about like, this is just, you know, who I am, I'm just gonna bring all of me to work, I often joke with them a little bit. I'm like, please don't bring your whole self to work. Bring your most evolved self to work and to bring your most evolved self home. Like, why wouldn't you want to walk through the world toggled up in evolved self where your container is big enough to house it all and not be affected by it all, and that you can really access all of your intelligence and bring to the current situation all of your resources? So When we divided out professional from personal, I almost think it was like a scheme of the ego that said, oh my gosh, I'm getting close to being found out. People actually start questioning their thinking. People will start to understand that they're not always the thinker, they're the ones being thought. You can commission thinking, but a lot of times you're just the observer of your thinking. And so the egos, it's like Let's divide out the personal so the ego can live, and let's teach people skills and strategies that, um, they can use to do the bidding of the ego. I get asked so often, Cy, how do I make— give me a leadership technique on how do I make other people do X. And I'm like, oh my goodness, it's not about making other people do X. It is about helping people self-reflect so that they can reveal to them themselves, who they really are, and do their best work. So we give people the skills and the tactics, but we don't really insist that they evolve. And we carve out some things that stay outside of— it's almost like a sacred cow. It's untouchable. So when I talk to people about venting as a behavior, it feels good. But it's not a healthy behavior. It is not a feeling. I am frustrated is sharing a feeling. Sarah does this crap on purpose is sharing a story to justify and fuel the feeling. When what you said to me is, I want to feel better and less frustrated, the worst thing you can do is get into the venting and fuel it. You can feel it, diffuse it, but if you don't want to suffer, you impact it or Let it go. Like, it's venting is a behavior. When I talk to people about not venting, the ego immediately rises up. They go, yeah, but don't you think actually some people need to vent even just for a few minutes? Like, people fight for the right to vent, and it's such unnecessary, unhelpful behavior. When I ask people like, what's your goal? They're like, I want to feel better. I'm like, oh, I have a scientific, evidence-based, neurologically supported way to do that is called self-reflection. And we can go in that direction. If you want to feel better, let's self-reflect and go through unpacking this and making sense of it and attributing and integrating. Like, I know that will get you there if that's your goal. And by the way, venting is sure To give you some good feelings, but it's not sustainable. It's not long-term, and it really begets more venting because those are those neural pathways that you are forming that need more itching. And so I really think it is time to merge personal and professional back together and to facilitate with our team members. That, um, based on this knowledge that they're accountable for their own emotional experience and their own responses, that, that we start to say and agree to share our accountability for our experiences at work and at home. And if you listen to me, you know I believe that we've really over-rotated on engagement and the outsourcing of that engagement. So instead of happiness being a choice, which is what High accountables tell us it is. I choose to engage knowing that reality will be present. We've over-rotated on engagement, and engagement without accountability, which is founded in self-reflection, creates entitlement. And it creates a situation that's not sustainable because we basically have assigned leaders responsibility for their own contentment and responsibility for everyone else's contentment or happiness. And so when I look at these levels, so many of us are operating at a really basic level when it comes to leadership and development. So if you look at the basics, we as leaders are asked to coach for performance, and that can include, you know, training people, upskilling them, readying them for what's next. And we do this a lot with people new to job or new to function or early in career, or perhaps to ready people in changing worlds. We also spend time on this for people low in accountability so that we can give them good information, help them understand what the desired essential behaviors are that we like to see, what the non-negotiables are, and invite them to align with what we need in order to move forward. We basically are focusing on skills and approaches and at times people's willingness this. And this is interesting because it's not only where we spend a lot of our time, but things that are non-negotiable and boundaries setting. If we were just better at setting boundaries and inviting people to sign up or out, we would take care of a majority of what we spend our time as leaders on that we call performance management and coaching. For performance. And what happens in this is we're not very good at it. Most of us aren't because we've been allowed for even giving feedback to be a non-negotiable. I often joke that leadership is the only job that you can keep even when you don't do it or you're not capable of it. And like, part of a leader's job is to give really, you know, good, succinct feedback and assignments for self-reflection. Say I'm not really good at giving feedback. If you were a welder and I said, I really need you to weld, and you're like, I'm not that good at it, I don't like doing it, it makes me nervous, I'm uncomfortable, I would say, well, you need to get comfortable and skilled. I need you to weld. You wouldn't keep your job long if your job was welding and you didn't do it. But leadership, we can keep our job a long time when we aren't Giving feedback or having conversations so that we don't have to get confrontational. We aren't doing one-on-ones. We aren't, uh, um, we aren't doing the basics. We aren't meeting with our people. We aren't calling them to greatness. And it's interesting to me because we spend a lot of time kind of dancing around this, and we do a lot of passive-aggressive where we don't give people feedback for a long period of time, and then we let them kind of Have all of the feedback. This basic level of performance-level coaching should actually be able to be pretty automated. You can connect the person directly with their reality. The best motivator of an individual is a direct, unaltered connection with reality. Reality is the best motivator. And what leaders do in this space is we tend to bend reality or muffle the voice of reality so that people don't get good information to make good choices with. So in this basic level, we need to teach leaders and reach agreement that they will have disciplines and dedications and practices that just make their daily Um, work about conversations so that we don't have to have confrontations, about calls to greatness, about loving people up and calling people up. And anytime a negotiation starts about a non-negotiable, we don't get ourselves confused with reality. We just help people understand the reality of the situation and invite them to make good choices. This should be some just pretty routine— it's actually pretty boring work, but it frees us up to do really great work. So that's level 1. And the next level of development is more coaching for development for the future. Now going back to coaching for performance, by the way, we've kind of outsourced a lot of this to HR, meaning HR has become kind of the workaround for us either not being willing or skilled in doing this as a leader. The next level we tend to coach Or outsource, I mean, to learning and development groups where we're like, I need you to grow my people so they're ready for what's next, whether that be a bigger role or a different job or position, or to be able to add additional value. And this too is the typical growth we do at work, getting people ready for a next position or as I said, greater responsibility. It focuses on giving them new knowledge. It tends though to be more experiential where we want to expose people to different work. We want to have them involved in not only just learning but applying their learning in projects. We just really want to use assignments, experiences, mentoring to fast-track their development And prepare them for, as I said, like a bigger value add to the organization. And those are the 2 levels we're operating in. But what I'll be talking about in each of these podcasts is a higher level calling for leaders. And it's the level I hope to help leaders operate at with only those that are willing. That's a prerequisite. But to do what I call coach for evolution. And this can only be done by those leaders that are heavily involved in one's own evolution. So gone are the days that you can teach what you haven't yet entered into yourself. Now, you don't have to be masters at it, at the accomplishment, but you do need to be mastering the practices that lead to evolution. I don't know if we're ever all going to be totally evolved, but it's a set of competencies like holding space, like leading self-reflection and contemplation, which is what I want to get to in this podcast where it's helping people use self-reflection and contemplation, like actually insisting and being able to facilitate self-reflection at this top level so that you can use self-reflection in the moment to stop someone's part in co-creating non-realities, stories, or to stop the conversation that isn't useful and start a new one. It's the life-changing stuff. So self-reflection is how I can catch myself when I'm stressed and in ego, in the not now, and bringing more to the emotional landscape than is justified for the actual experiences happening. Self-reflection is what stops the action and gets us on better behavior. It's what helps us take next right action and in the moment. That's where miracles happen. With a sudden change of perspective, we can in the moment co-create something completely different. So self-reflection is like the intervention on the daily, but contemplation is bigger than that. It is contemplation is when I go beyond self-reflection, and I start to make sense of my world. I start to see, as I said before, where the themes are, and how I end up in similar situations and what my part is in those situations. And it's the insights, the aha, the ability to go, oh my gosh, I now understand the part I've played in this. And if I can own it, I can open myself up to move forward very differently. It's the contemplation, the sensemaking mentoring, that starts to see the patterns in our lives and gets us out of the daily into what I call the evolution, where we can be more able to walk the world freely because we are less dependent on our external circumstances and more dependent on some core wisdom in our center that is applicable to multiple situations on the daily. And this is leadership at the top level. Top-level leaders are insisting their teams go even beyond self-reflection in the moment So that they can stop their part in co-creating what isn't working and really take part into meaningful work and creating what is sustainable and what will work in the future. And we are at such a level of focusing on the fixes that might dissipate the daily drama that we're all feeling starved for. Participation in making a huge difference and having impact in the world. And this is really the outcome of what we've been promoting in HR and leadership development. It's like, when even when I say, like, let's move people beyond venting, they're like, so we should have a policy, and we should just tell people no venting, we should just have a rule. I'm like, no, you should get competent at opening your heart to someone who's suffering and then having the ability to help foster self-reflection so they can see their suffering is from their story, not their reality. And in that space, you can invite them to walk through the world differently. And this is stuff that we can't teach in a class. This is stuff that we need leaders to step up to and take people into their worlds for multiple conversations. This isn't a one-on-one. This is a conversation over time. This is not knowing the answers but committing to, you know what, let's keep thinking. And a call to self-reflection is really a call to self-study and a call to curiosity in the world. And As we lean into space holding, which is not fixing, it's not over-functioning, I find leaders who really do the work of both people in the relationship. They bring up the issue and then they work on the solution. And bringing up the issue and then working on the solution really teaches people that that's your responsibility. And the danger zone is when I get over-responsible for How it's working for you in your world. When I'm laying awake at night thinking, I wonder how I could get that person more motivated, a great leader goes to the person and just says, what have you noticed about your motivation level? And are you content with that? And what consequences have you experienced given your current state of motivation? And what are you reading? And who are you listening to on podcasts? And what are you doing to evolve? In a way that you can be more self-motivating. Like instead of me laying awake trying to figure out how to motivate you, I just go ask you: How are you going to exhibit higher levels of motivation and leaning into the work that we have at hand? And so this isn't about passively waiting till the venting resides. This isn't about. Hoping that they'll figure it out or do the work or get better skilled at their jobs. This is you as a leader getting skilled at leading self-reflection and contemplation so that you don't take the burden from them. You don't try and resolve someone else's cognitive dissonance when they are just realizing that they had a goal, but the behavior they're involved in isn't working to meet the goal that they set for themselves. It is not robbing people of that learning. It's Not leaving the learning on the table that happens in the moment when after the fact we ask people, what did you learn about yourself? What did the situation reveal to you? What meaning do you make of this? What was your goal? And, uh, um, what was your approach and how'd that work for you? And is there anything you'd like to change in your approach? These are just key. Questions that we need to put out there. And in the moment, you might not get an answer. The point isn't that people can give you a self-reflective, brilliant, insightful answer on the fly. It's that you have planted beautiful questions in their mind so that each time they find themselves in that place, they're like, why do I end up here? Why does it seem that others can move through this more skillfully? And so it's really leaving the— I don't want to say burden of learning, um, on the one that's being coached, but having a clear sense of the difference between the two of us in this moment, that I'm here to witness your learning, but it's not something I can do for you or over-function in a way. I can't rescue you. I can't enable you. I can't protect you from how the world will evolve you. I can't keep the world from polishing your rough edges. And there are times where we just have to sit in a supportive space while we watch someone be polished by the world and let them know that the container that we bring to them is bigger than what they're experiencing. But we invite them to really mine the experience for all that it has for them, because this learning will be future results. And the reason we're not building capacity and getting future results is because there's so little learning taking place. And the learning that is taking place is us trying to feed in to a resistant audience rather than us helping an audience understand that the experience they're having right now has to do with their own state of evolution, and that if they want something different, they're going to need to do something different. And so I'm all about just helping people understand their own lives right now. And not me adding my view of it in, but just asking them to make meaning of it themselves and to accept what they're learning as good-to-know information that will feed their own evolution. And I say this in a A way that I guess I just feel the need to clarify. So much learning and development is, you're not capable, let's make you capable, or you're like a self-help project, like let's fix you. Or— I'm not talking about changing people. I'm talking about evolution. And most of what evolution is, is revealing the best about people. There are many stories about sculptors, and one was attributed to Michelangelo, but I'm not even sure if it's true. But supposedly he was asked after carving the Statue of David if it was hard to create such a masterpiece out of marble. And he, or a sculpture sculptor, supposedly responded saying it wasn't hard. I just removed from the marble everything that wasn't David. And that's the counterintuitive approach I believe we need to take to leadership. I can't make you into something. I can't fix what's broken in you because nothing's broken. I need to take away all that is drama because one's natural state, once the drama's gone, is innovation and collaboration and the ability to participate at really high levels in meaningful work. And so it's not about carving, um, David. It's about removing what isn't David so that David can be revealed. And I think that's a lot about what leadership is. And so much of that is us not projecting our experience onto another and simply starting with basic questions like asking them What sense do you make of that? And what meaning does that have for you? And is this something you've run into before? Is there anything familiar about this? If you had to connect this into a past experience, what would be most like this? And what have you seen people do in situations like this that helps? And what hinders? And what do you need right now? And What can I do for you? We need to spend a lot less time focused on performance coaching. That needs to become more of a pass/fail rather than chasing people who have low willingness around. And we need to really focus on those mid and high accountables that really want meaningful work and they want meaningful connection. And so as I end today, I just want you to ask yourself, like, how much time do you or others on your team spend self-reflecting? And hopefully it's not zero, because it's the foundation for accountability and growth and evolution. And you can't change what you don't own, as I said. And so start even just your Zoom gatherings with self-reflections. And it can be you asking a question, or it could be you asking people to bring a favorite quote and talk about what meaning it has for them. We found that people who are resilient have go-to songs, go-to quotes, go-to fables or stories or metaphors that they pull out to broaden their container. It's almost like they have their own little personal Bible of things they've collected along the way to bring perspective to their current situation, to remember the size of the container in which to hold their current situation. And really asking people to start meetings with like even readings. One of the things I'm sad that many of us have lost, that when I worked in a Catholic hospital was such a big part of who we were, is we would start every meeting with a reflection. And they would be chosen by individuals. And what I loved about one of the leaders I worked for is whenever I would come to them like frustrated, she would take me back to visit the morning's reflection. And she would say, if you were guided by this reflection, how would you respond? Like if your next move was informed by what we reflected on this morning, and even at times I remember her This is old, but back in the mimeograph, the purple mimeograph, big roll machines that they copied things off, she would print off like these, um, quotes and she would cut them. She would take one piece of paper and there'd be like printed 10, um, of the same quote, and she would cut them. She'd give them little pieces of paper, and she would even say to me, she would say, do you have your reflection with you? Why don't you pull it out, read it, and see if that doesn't give you some guidance. And I just am a firm believer that if we can spend moments where people are reflecting or meditating and disconnecting from their ego, if we can just infuse the world with a bit of space between an external stimulus and an externally focused response, that we can find a whole lot of wisdom that we're in desperate need of right now. And I think it's so important to help people just pause for a moment and move forward, guided by reflections. And again, some of those questions, it's like, well, what is your goal? Or what was your goal? And it may be, how do you want to feel? Danielle LaPorte talks about your core desired feelings. And then Plan your behavior around what you hope to accomplish and plan your reflection around, if this was my goal, what was my approach and what were the odds of that approach working? Those are just baby sets of reflection. What happened? What are you feeling? How did you respond? Had that worked for you? Then what happened? What would you like to change in your response? Even a reflection asking people, what's one amend That you would like to make so that you have less heaviness in your heart? There are so many questions out there, and I feel, um, called to advocate for more self-reflection in our workplace. And a lot of people are like, well, Cy, how do we do that? It's our questions and our tools. The No Ego tools at the back of that No Ego book are designed to break projection, which is external identification with limited circumstances, and to bypass beyond the ego and open up all of your thinking so that you can put energy focus into higher-level approaches. And all of that's done through our tools It's the practice that will almost guarantee that you do high-level thinking rather than ego thinking as you approach situations or problems. So how do you do this stuff? I know sometimes people keep wanting me to have an answer that isn't that, but it really is self-reflection, tools for self-reflection, questions for self-reflection. So please stay tuned for more. at the No Ego Podcast. And ask yourself, your assignment is how much time do you spend on reflection yourself? And how much time are you facilitating reflection with your teams? If you have questions, if you have comments, if you want to know more about these topics that I'm trying to give language to, definitely send them to us. We've got a great place to do that, info@sciwakehaman.com. If you're not signed up for our newsletter, you're really missing out. We aren't just telling you the happenings of the day, we're giving you fantastic, great content. And we will be pulling away from some of the investment we make to put content out in social media as the algorithms change and they perhaps don't ensure that the people who want the content get it. We have found a surefire way to get our content every single week is to sign up for our newsletter. And you can do that at the website realitybasedleadership.com. I hope you're all safe and well. And I hope this week, if I've done nothing else, I've got you willing to do some pondering, to ask what's your part in your current experience in the world? What is this revealing for you? What does it mean to you? What is the world suggesting to you? What invitations are being made to you To see reality for what it really is and use that information and your feelings to fuel your evolution. There is a way to move through this world with a steady, sustainable state of contentment. And I really hope that I teach you, and I teach leaders to facilitate that for others. That's where we're going to do our best work, folks. Be well. This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Sy Wakeman.