S4E6: Hope Makes A Comeback

This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Sy Wakeman. Welcome to another episode of the No Ego Podcast. This is season 4, and this is Sy Wakeman. I am riffing on modern leadership, how we need to transcend the traditional leadership philosophies that we've been taught lead differently in hopefully this great new world we're in. Today's focus is on helping hope make a comeback. Now, leaders have long talked about vision. We've held sessions to come up with vision statements, and quite frankly, it's a lame attempt at outlining hope. Vision statements, those are really difficult things to get out of when you're a human individual. I think hope is a better place to work in that hope is more personal. It provides people a personal sense of connection to a greater future. And I am all fired up about talking to leaders about helping hope make a comeback. Right now, there's a bit of suffering going on, and it is so easy to suffer. It's so easy that we're often the source of our own suffering. Suffering just requires little effort or creativity. You just follow the masses and assume the worst and take the safest route, believe everything you think. It's so easy to toggle down and get convinced that we're the victims of our circumstances, or that even this past year is the worst thing anyone's ever gone through, when if you talk to just individuals for a few moments about The most trying times of their life. Many have gone through far worse. Collectively, we all have gotten a taste of what losing some privilege looks like, but it's the common experience, I think, that has brought us all together, and it's the common experience that we can leverage to really create something different. But it's not the worst experience most individuals have been through. It is the easiest to do a bit of suffering around because it's so easy to find somebody that has the common experience and is ready to collude with us. Things are opening up, my friends. Some of the, the ends in sight. People are excited about some of their own suffering ending, but if they don't realize their suffering was at their own And it was their response to external circumstances more than the external circumstances. If they aren't realizing that, they are going to find themselves in what I call the pain-pleasure duality, the the spectrum, the the polarity of that. And we are feeling some big energy. Things are are starting to open up, and we're certainly heading towards some pleasure, some decadence. There seems to be a lot of pent-up demand for fun. Many are even predicting something similar to the Roaring Twenties that followed the Spanish flu pandemic. And yes, pleasure does most certainly follow pain, but in a weird way, the two are kindred spirits in the same cycle. Whenever we're feeling pleasure, built in that pleasure is going to be the future absence of that pleasure, which will bring pain. It really is a A cycle because pleasure always returns to pain. You know, why is that? Well, when we're experiencing either one, the freedom and happiness we all crave is really based in external circumstances. I feel pleasure when things are to my preference and pain when they aren't. And it really is still working on getting through the judgment of the ego about what's good, what's bad. And so much of how we feel in this realm is then attributed to our external circumstances. You know, what I had hoped for all of us in the imprisonment that was the whole stay at home or work under really tough conditions was that as we were at home and as we were realizing that our way as a country and as neighbors was not working, that it was dividing and not unifying us, what I was hoping we'd realize is that we needed to transcend the duality and the polarity and transcend it with evolution and the call to connect with what's inside of us, like our true nature. And some have certainly used this time out as a sabbatical, as a time in an ashram, so to speak. Some— many have certainly contemplated and grown beyond what the experience of the past year has revealed to them. I've seen some profound transformation, and some leaders have stepped in and really facilitated the self-reflection necessary and There are just so many people emerging, not just excited to go out and be free and have fun— that, that you all get that, we, we hope you enjoy— but to go beyond that, to really make sense of what's been revealed to us and the work at hand and what's possible. So I really hoped that people would realize as they were limited, that their experience of the world, their pain or pleasure, can have more to do with an internal state of contentment, their choices, their dedications, their practices, rather than their external forces. That, that when kind of limited enough, many times people break through that. That was why the profound revelations that came from Viktor Frankl in his book after being a prisoner of war was so Amazing that he found the truth of even though you may externally be imprisoned, internally, which is what drives your true state of happiness and contentment, internally you always have what you need at resource to you, and it's connecting into that. Well, that was my hope, and many people are delivering up on that hope. But there are many who survived it and are now reacting and responding to it by, you know, answering their pent-up traveling cravings or going out into the world or looking for some decadence or insisting their employer accommodate their preferences. Even foregoing what is necessary or vital for the business. And I just want to remind people that when our actions are fueled in reaction to what's happening, that's rebellion. You're still not free. That is rebellion. But when we're integrating what has happened and intentionally choosing a different future that we can craft together, that's revolution. Is very, very different. And when we're not happy with our external world and we want to transform it, we've got to transform our internal world. That truly is the only way to then move beyond rebellion into revolution and transform our external world. And if you're not involved in this internal work as a leader, you're leading a rebellion, not a revolution. And even lack of intervention in some of this is a form of collusion and a form of maintenance. There are so many people that are emerging right now hungry for action. They're unsettled, and as I said, they have a lot of pent-up needs and even claims of rights to pleasure. And amen, Brothers and sisters, we should all relish in the spring that's here and the new freedoms afforded to us by the geniuses of our scientists and the vaccines and, and hopefully some justice that's coming our way. There's no need to deny— there's no need to deny this scrumptious feeling of delight and hope. I am not about preaching Temperance. I want you guys to just feel the beautiful energy in the world and the happiness of people hugging again, as appropriate, and all that good stuff. And I talk a lot about leadership, the kind that goes beyond ego, the modern kind, the sustainable kind. So that's why the topic for today's podcast is leadership and its role in helping hope make a comeback, not just relying on external circumstances changing so that people feel some pleasure and happiness, but really moving in an intentional way to go beyond the feelings of pleasure and facilitate in our teams a whole sense and state of hope. And I am preaching to leaders about our role in helping hope make a definite comeback. We need to intentionally channel all of this fantastic, wonderful energy of opening into, like, conscious and intentional improvements in our lives. I want to channel the energy into conscious, intentional choices I want us to be thinking about and capitalizing on this moment as leaders so that we focus on improvements in our lives and at work so that we can ensure that we just don't waste what's been revealed to us, that we don't leave such good learning on the table, which is quite honestly one of the most wasteful things I think we do as leaders. Leave learning on the table. We help people through a crisis, but we don't go back to say, what did this reveal to you? What did you learn about yourself? What were ways you helped and ways you hindered? How did your choices co-create this very situation you found yourself in that wasn't that desirable? And what choices could you make differently in the future? How could you respond differently? Where do you need to grow? To be immune to the hooks that you found your ego responding to, the traps that you got into, the dictates of your external circumstances. So often we get people through the moment, but we don't mine those experiences for learning. And sometimes that learning is, dang it, we can do hard things. Remember what we just went through so the next time you're Challenged, you're confident that you've got this. We need to integrate our experiences. So much of leadership is about getting our people through the moment, getting through the day. That's survival stuff. Thriving, not surviving, is about taking every ounce of what we experience and using self-reflection in the short term to stop the conversation we're having and start a new one. And contemplation in the long term to really evolve beyond our, our daily Groundhog Day where we experience the same external insults, we react the same, and end up feeling victims rather than masters of our circumstances. So I really want leaders to quit leaving this on Learning on the table. We solve problems, but we fail to facilitate that self-reflection that fuels learning and fosters ownership, creates the foundation of accountability, because it's that reflection that reveals choice, the choices that were involved, and most importantly, the choices that could differ. in the future to create the desired outcome if we don't reflect and integrate learning from our daily experiences. It's not about sending our people to training. It's not about just reading a book or listening to a podcast. It is taking and making sense of what happened to us and carving out our agency in the midst of that so that we can exercise more agency and really step up and partner in co-creation in the world, that we can identify our part in the mess so that we can make different choices and create the desired outcome. If we leave people blind to their choices, if we're not doing this integration, this sense-making mentoring, this accounting for that is the foundation of accountability, then Those around us find victimhood as like the only state that they can be in, in the present and in the future, because they're without the ability to realize agency, their part in the mess. They're left to just gulp up pleasure when it comes and resist pain as it threatens to present itself. They become dependent on the circumstances and so become very toggled down into protect myself, get it while I can. take full advantage, maximize my individual opportunity, which is short-term. It's self-soothing. It's the work of the ego, rather than with great leadership transcending and foregoing some of that immediate gratification to joining together, making sense of our world, and building something that will sustain us, that we can take pleasure in far into the future. Folks that don't realize their own agency are more likely to pursue their own gain in this win-loss world as they compete for other people, with a tendency to only focus on getting their fair share, as if the world were a limited place. But if as a leader we can foster self-reflection and Self-reflection isn't just about going within, it's about revealing choice, revealing one's place for impact, and one's ability to maintain contentment and gratitude and hope regardless of the external environment. It helps people be able to look at things bigger than the moment and to be soothed by the knowledge That they have a lot more to do with their experience than ever thought. This, folks, gives them the gift of freedom. Freedom to walk through the world differently, with more patience, more enjoyment, more hope, less panic, less fear of missing out, less urgency to get what they came for now, and more Appreciation and savoring of what we already have and the important things in life. It gives them hope. I think the greatest gift a leader can give another is the glimpse into their part in co-creating their own worlds. See, we can teach people to transcend the seemingly externally imposed and inescapable trek of pain and pleasure to find their own freedom to feel happy and to be content regardless of the circumstances. We do this through self-reflection to reveal choice, and we do this in the peddling of hope, envisioning together a very different array of positive possibilities. That depend on us to come to fruition, that depend on us not being our whole selves and claiming it as authentic, but our most evolved selves, those that do the inner work and bring our highest self engaged in our most intentional behavior to work and to home. Hope for the future, calling others up to their highest possible self, Based on a ton of compassion for their human condition. We gotta always remember that. The call to greatness, for those of you in leadership, it's all done by teaching those you lead how to use great mental processes to go beyond their egos, go beyond the drama, and to build something with their own hands and minds that they will take pride in rather than complain about going Forward. So basically, the way you do this is you stop letting people bring their whole selves to work and ask them to bring their most evolved selves to work. You call them up to their best possible self. You ensure that you maintain, all the while, compassion for their human condition, for your own human condition, and the aspirations that You screw up only daily, but that you really are teaching them about how their mind works and how the world works. And so many things right now that are taught in our world, so many things ignore the role that the individual has in co-creation. Like, current engagement theory would suggest that one's engagement at work is solely dependent upon the experience that the organization provides, whether it be in general or customized to one personally. And during this past year, the engagement surveys we've conducted at Reality-Based Leadership have just really validated a mind-blowing discovery I had a while back, that one's experience of their workplace is very dependent upon the amount of personal accountability one takes for their lives. One's level of accountability determines their experience at work. It determines their satisfaction, their willingness to stay and basically engage. So in the same organization, the same experience being provided, there are 2 different experiences for employees, not dependent on their leaders or their departments, but on their own accountability levels. We look at the same company and the Low accountables are having a very different experience than the high accountables with the same leaders. Totally different. It seems that the external world really is a projection of our internal world. I mean, how can you explain such a difference of experience in the same organization by employees? When we look at the data, The main correlation we found right now was accountability, which is, i.e., choice. And this has played out in so many fields of study that happiness is a choice, that engagement is a choice, that we are always co-creating our current experience. And that is the power that leaders can help their teams and individuals discover, the power of co-creation. True empowerment is stepping into the power you already have, and it is a ton. If people could realize through what leaders were teaching them on the daily that we are always projecting our internal world onto our external world, we are the ones creating our experiences for the most part and our own happiness levels, it would just be a fantastic Leap forward. When it comes to leading, you know, and helping hope to make a comeback, what if it was simply about choice, about painting a picture of what's possible and then facilitating the brainstorming of what if we could, like having people try it on for size and thinking about what would be amazing and then just dreaming and scheming about what if we could do that. And then Using our questions that tap into innovation, like, what if we could? How could we? And what if it was just as simple as asking people to choose hope, to choose happiness? I mean, could it be that easy? Are we like missing this huge opportunity? I personally think so. You know, a great deal of talk and concern is about the impending mental health crisis. It worries me. And I would tell you, yes, these times are challenging for many. How our brains and our bodies function and experience the world can be beyond our influence on some level for sure. I'm not here to blame the victims. You may not be responsible for your current mental health challenges, but you are responsible to your recovery. You're responsible to live a purposeful and peaceful life in the midst of those challenges. And that is where we can really call people up to greatness. And so I want you to ask yourself, like, what role do you as a leader have in highlighting best possible scenarios, thinking big? So much of our conversation is which side are you on, which camp are you And as a leader, it's our job to say, folks, there aren't 2 camps. There's one camp, the one that includes all of us. Let's think bigger about what this could be. People are like, are you gonna make me come back to work? Can I still work from home, or do I have to come in? Let's think beyond that. Let's think bigger than that. Let's think about, given our new abilities to work remotely, how to put them to best use. Use, not just for your preference, but for what we could create together and what brings us energy by being together, what creates results better than we could do apart, and what is conducive to a time where we don't have a commute. Maybe the commute's not worth it for these types of activities, but for other activities it is. I really want people to move beyond this whole pain-pleasure— I'm coming out of pain, I want pleasure— it's like it's a short-term fix. It feels good, but it's still the realm of the ego. Beyond that is not just what is the policy going to be, but it's building relationships and building teams and developing business acumen and really heavy allegiance to business process. Allegiance to good mental processes. That's really how we ditch the drama, is we eliminate emotional waste. It's waste. Through improving processes, emotional waste is improved by good mental processes. Good mental processes is understanding how the mind works, and when we're into polarity, and when we're into duality, and that we can't just try and get less pain, more pleasure. They're on the same spectrum. We have to transcend and be less dependent on external circumstances for our pain or pleasure. We have to be building space really beyond that, like helping people live happily independent of temporary circumstances. That's the work of the leader in the modern world. World. So what's the path? You got to love people up, and then you got to call them up. Love them up, accept and affirm the incredible components that they bring to the table, and then call them up to their best selves. And then take that energy of all those called-up people and drive that energy towards hope and innovation. Everybody in their high selves naturally are capable of great As a leader, too often we're tolerant of people being tuggled down in their low selves. Our job is to love people up so they feel safe and they answer the call. If we just try and impose rules without a relationship, we're going to get rebellion. That's what's happening. If you want a revolution, you got to love people up, but you got to call people up and really help them realize that they're happier in that state and they do their best work in that state. So I'm thrilled. It does feel like the world is opening up. There's a lot of high energy. I know just in my own personal life, you know, that is returning. But will it be the energy of rebellion or revolution? The difference: leadership and intentionality. We need to work with people and foster the willingness to unlearn, to question, to curate, and to choose. This revealing of choice is the most incredible thing a leader can do for another, is reveal where they have choice. They could step into their agency and co-create a very different future. It's like the ultimate gift of freedom. But you know, choosing— people resist it. It's difficult. If we actively choose, we step into accountability. But here's the catch: the world we create from here forward with our conscious choices is ours and ours alone. We forfeit— in our choosing, we forfeit all future complaining, And we surrender our victim identity when we step into the the choosing. You know, people are scared to choose; they might choose wrong. But choosing and owning it gets us learning. It just gets us information to use in our next choices. It's continual incrementalism moving forward with an eye towards ownership and co-creating. Rather than just surviving forward with a hope of a different nature than what I'm talking about— hope that things stay good for a while— a lot of anxiety is taken away with agency to know that I can have impact. And one thing that keeps us from choosing at times is fear of regret, or some people tell me they have regrets, but regrets are just decisions made while learning. Like, if you meet your choices with a balance of compassion, then you know that you're choosing. And the cool thing is you can choose differently with new information, and it's just a constant interaction with the world in which you stepped up into, and at least you're going to give it a shot at making things far better into the future. So regret is when we forget that we made decisions while still learning, and that's why we need compassion with like very little judgment. That's what's required, but it's got to be ownership nonetheless. So back to hope. I've been thinking a lot about this topic of hope and a modern leader's role in Helping hope make a comeback. Maybe it's because it's spring and more people are vaccinated each day, even though many more people are also hospitalized each day. Maybe it's because it's, you know, Passover, where many of my friends are remembering the story of the Israelites' journey out of slavery into a promised land. Maybe it's like Easter. A lot of my friends are remembering or celebrating, you know, Jesus's rising, his journey from cross to resurrection. These stories right now are just so filled with hope. It's such a powerful, simple word. It's a powerful condition. It's not just like desired for a single outcome. I'm not talking like I hope to get promoted so that you're building in with that disappointment when you don't. That's pain-pleasure stuff. I'm talking about a state of hopefulness, general big, big old-fashioned optimism. And I really think it's where leaders can make a difference right now. The stories we're telling about hope, whether it be Passover or Easter or, you know, other many other celebrations I'm not as familiar with, They're stories that retell the times when those we admired experienced horrid, horrid challenges. And in the stories, our ancestors, the people we admire, were suffering. They were grieving. They were isolated. They're feeling betrayed. They faced horrendous injustices. And Yet they came beyond that. They rose up, they transcended together to inspire whole generations. That's the type of hope I'm talking about. You know, we're also, um, going to soon be celebrating Ramadan, and I love the combination in the spring of all the messages of rising up and transcending and hope. Coupled with Ramadan, which is a celebration of the breakthrough that happens when all these initial revelations were delivered to Muhammad. And it's a month spent in rededication to the practices that bring us self-reflection and self-discipline and self-improvement and how to heighten our devotion and our worship to something greater than ourselves. And I love the combination of The hope from Passover and Easter combines with the call of Ramadan to really reestablish good habits and dedications and do that self-reflection and really try and heighten our consciousness, our intentionality. It's all about like taking an entire month to toggle up and begin again. I think the combination of those two, there's no accident in my mind that as humans we find all these ways to tell the stories of hope. We also find all of these ways and spiritual teachers that call us to contemplation and dedication to practices. There's just so many metaphors for what leadership is, both in the ancient world and in the modern world. It's really a call to remember, like, tough times and to claim them as our own and to rise above above it, but to do it in a revolutionary way, to do the revolutionary thing called hope, but to also reflect and, I don't know, like adopt and recommit to those dedications and practices that we talk a lot about on this podcast— good mental processes, eliminating drama, living our best lives. So if you think about hope, it's really the ability to hold on to the bigger truth of things even when the proof goes out of view. It's like the holding on of the possible, the belief in the best of ourselves, whether it's like granting benefit of the doubt to somebody else or suspending judgment, or as a leader, hosting curiosity rather than judgment. Anytime you do that where you say, don't put your energy here, put it over here, what you're doing is saying, let's put our eyes on hope. Let's in this moment create something very different, very expansive, bigger than our small self that just showed up today. I just really think that leadership is about dealing in this hope, this personal connection to something better, the belief that we as individuals can become better, the belief that We can do hard things, the belief that we can improve the way we work together, that we can create the homes we want, the families we want, the workplaces we want. This isn't about positive thinking, folks. It's not trying to invalidate our pain. It's about strengthening our ability to continue to return to the possibilities, right? So it's, it's suspending judgment of the present, using the barometer of my ego about whether I like that or don't like that. It's about suspending that judgment in favor of like a longer perspective, building something that can hold more or is possible, makes more possible, I guess. So in a way, you know, having hope links Your undesired present or past to the future. It's about having a vision for what could happen, and whether it does or not specifically, even just envisioning a possibility can make you, one, feel better. So there's power in hope. Just envisioning this could turn out okay in the present makes you feel better. And I think it motivates you. In fact, there's quite a bit of people studying this. Just having hope motivates you to taking action towards a better future. It can motivate you to take whatever steps you need to take to get there. And a lot of this cannot be self-generated. Like, a person in the midst of despair or desperation, it's hard to self-generate hope. That's what leadership is all about. Is that we can be the ones that take care of ourselves and engage in the practices where we can be the carriers of hope when others can't be, that we can do that, keep that seed, keep that, that, that space open, and continue to make the invitation and the call up for others to to help us with that lifting. So as leaders, I just wanted to get you thinking about hope, and I want you assessing yourself whether you're walking through this world with optimism and hope and gratitude, and whether you're expecting enough out of your people when it comes to transcending their own suffering or even their own pleasure. Because your teens are tired right now. They are craving some fun. So don't skip the lighthearted joy and the fun. We gotta love these folks up, but get them into some dreaming and scheming about how cool this could be. Don't just answer with a policy, you know, on how we're gonna work together. Just dream bigger. Dream bigger with them. Not create and, and outline what our new constraints will be, because that just gives them something to rebel against. Not catering to what they want to do just from a what pleases them standpoint, but as a leader, bring people together and help them find new ways that they can forego some of their personal preference and create something of value that can really fuel a better future. Ask yourself, what's the state of hope in your own life? What is the state of your self-reflection and claiming of your own choices? Because you can't lead what you're not engaged in. You don't have to have this master— that will never happen— but you got to be engaged in this and be a fellow, fellow pilgrim on the path, I guess. So I think hope and faith are tied a lot Together. It's, you know, the audacity to believe that it can be and will be different, and that we each can have a part to play in the future, but only if we accept accountability and choose to commit and own the results of our choices as either learning without regret, just information for the next step. And so let's help hope make a comeback. We can paint this picture together, but we also need to make those individual calls to greatness. We need to remind people that their own happiness and engagement are choices they can make, that buy-in is a verb. It's their action. It's their taking the risk, having the audacity to believe in us rather than to complain about them. And I'll say that again. What we're trying to do is move people out of judgment and victimhood, complaining about the them in quotes, all these villains doing things to us and failing us, and instead really believing in us, the collective genius of us. And so the call to action is really asking if people are willing to believe in us And give up complaining about the them. It's really the managing of energy. As I said, this is modern leadership. We need to bring hope back to the forefront in your life and everybody else's life. But start with yourself first. Get intentional and then do it for your people. Remind them that their happiness is definitely a choice or an accumulation of all of their choices. Also have some fun. I'm not Scrooge. Enjoy the spring. Run freely out there in the world in the moment. Your pleasure rebellion from the pain— enjoy it. But don't forget that this work is bigger than that. It isn't just riding the pain-pleasure cycle. It's about leading people to a place beyond that where they experience a whole different type of freedom. The kinds they are craving, the kind that reality-based leadership helps people come to know. So I always end my podcast with an assignment for self-reflection. Here's yours: reflect on what is the state of hope in your life right now. Take a look. Is your language positive? Is it about the future? Who are you hanging out with? Like. What's your IG feed look like? Is it mocking others or inspiring yourself? How many of your conversations and meetings are focusing on the future and our part in it? What challenges are you accepting with that incredible word yes, a confident yes? These are tough times, but these are our times. And what's the state of your confidence that together We are genius and can create the world that we deserve. This is not a time for leaders to share in the woes and the worries, folks. It's a time for us to hand out the canvases and the paintbrushes and enlist the talent of our teams to, to create that masterpiece, to build a better workplace and a better world place. So reflect. What's the state of your hope? And, uh, are there ways you can inspire and encourage and call people up? Let's help hope make a comeback. I hope you guys have a fantastic week. More to come next week. Stay safe and well. This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your role play. I'm Sy Wakeman.