You Have a Choice, page 8
The ultimate choice in an unreasonable working environment is whether to stay and accept the toxic consequences to your mental and emotional health, or to leave and accept the consequences of financial uncertainty. In other words, you are making an implicit choice every day when you show up to work. To make that choice explicit, consider what conditions would cause you to quit and accept the consequences of having to find another job. That’s your boundary—the circumstances that would cause you to change your actions.
Let’s use our framework to transform this common situation of overworking from a circumstance to be endured into a choice:
What isn’t working for you?
I have to work weekends because my boss is giving me too much work.
How are you the problem?
When my manager gives me more work than is reasonable, I accept the work and commit to getting it done, even if it means working through the weekend and exhausting myself.
You have a choice.
I can choose how I spend my time. If I don’t want to work on the weekends, I can set and communicate that boundary: “If you give me more work than I can finish during the week, I will not sacrifice my weekend time to get it done.”
Setting that boundary may have consequences. If my manager responds that I must work weekends or I will get fired, I still have a choice: whether to work weekends to keep this job with this manager or to hold my boundary of not working weekends and accept the consequences of no longer having this job. It’s not an easy choice, but it is a choice.
A year into my Chief of Staff job at Google, I was so drained and frustrated that I started to interview outside of Google. Since I was already ready to quit, I took the risk of having a vulnerable conversation with my VP in which I communicated that I didn’t like how I was spending my time at work on repetitive operations and processes, even though I “knew” it was part of my job. I asked to spend more of my time on strategic work that would be more impactful for Google and more meaningful for me. I figured the worst possible outcome was that I would get fired and I’d have to look for a new job, but I was already doing that anyway.
To my surprise, my VP agreed to my request. We rewrote my job description to focus more on the strategic work and found other owners of the operational work that had been draining me. Not only did that conversation result in an immediate job satisfaction improvement, I also became more comfortable making direct requests of my VP, which allowed us to continue improving our working relationship over the 6+ years we worked together.
Privilege check: I was able to have that conversation because I had other job options available to me and the financial security to have the time to look for another job. And I had the safety of knowing that my VP shared my demographic (we were both white heterosexual able-bodied men), so I was likely to be judged on my merits, rather than other factors.
If you don’t feel similarly safe having such a vulnerable conversation, can you try a smaller, safer experiment? Maybe you could experiment with delivering a lower standard of work if it’s being done in the evenings or on weekends, to see what kind of feedback you get. Or perhaps you could volunteer for a project you find energizing and use that commitment to say no to other work you find draining.
Your situation won’t change until you change the situation. Building up the courage to take a different action will only happen when you decide that you are no longer willing to endure your present conditions. As a result, you might experience negative consequences and hopefully learn you have the resilience to survive them, as I did after experiencing the consequences of setting a boundary with my manager after burning out. But you might also discover that setting the boundary leads to a much better situation, as happened after my conversation with my VP.
That’s what makes it an experiment; you don’t know the result, and you are testing the limits of the situation to learn more about your current reality so that you can make different choices in the future that create different results.
Acceptance is not approval, and impact over intent
I have talked about accepting yourself as you are, your parts as they are, and others as they are. You may be feeling tension because you don’t want to accept things as they are—you want them to be different!
One helpful concept for me was that acceptance is not approval. Accepting things as they are is merely an acknowledgment that this is the way things are today. It does not mean you approve of the situation or think it should stay that way. But you can’t drive effective change unless you start from where things are. If you want to change yourself or others, you must first start by accepting the current reality even (or especially) if you don’t approve of it.
A similar tension lies in the social justice phrase “impact over intent.” Our actions and words have an impact on others, and a thoughtful person will take responsibility for that impact rather than defend themselves by focusing on their good intent. The reality is that our actions may affect others in unexpected and disproportionate ways, especially when we act from an identity of privilege or authority. We may not agree with or approve of others’ interpretations of our actions, but refusing to accept their experience means we have decided to privilege our own interpretations over theirs, denying what they feel and how they are affected.
Instead, we can get curious and explore their experience, perhaps using the skills developed in part 2 of exercise 4.3. What did that person see or hear? What did your actions signify to them? This sort of perspective-taking can be difficult but is a skill that you can develop with practice. Effective change starts by accepting the reality of the impact we have on others, regardless of our intent.
I see these two phrases as the same concept separated by a power differential.
1. When in a lower power position, the phrase that acceptance is not approval allows us to plan effectively within the power structure as it exists today, without necessarily believing in the justice of that power structure. This can include setting effective boundaries, as described in the previous section, and being willing to accept the consequences that might come from challenging that power structure.
2. When in a higher power position, the phrase “impact over intent” reminds us that we must accept the downstream consequences of our actions as reality, even though we cannot predict all of those consequences due to the unpredictable and complex dynamics of causality. We may find it easier to justify our actions by our good intent, but this is a denial of the power and responsibility we bear.
Either way, effective change begins with acceptance of the current reality, even if we would prefer to deny or avoid that reality.
Accept reality
I have now shared how to accept yourself (chapter 2) by accepting your parts (chapter 3) and how to accept others as they are (chapter 4). This theme of acceptance extends to everything else in reality.
In 2020, we dealt with several unprecedented events: the global COVID-19 pandemic, the racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd, and for us on the West Coast, significant wildfires in California, where it was unsafe to breathe outside and the sky turned orange for several days.
I realized that “It shouldn’t be this way” became a common refrain in my brain: I “shouldn’t” have to deal with my coaching business slowing down because clients were more concerned about their survival than getting coaching for their personal development. I “shouldn’t” have to watch my kid all day because our daycare center closed for several months. I “should” be able to go outside whenever I want.
As you can guess by now, the problem was not the events, but my expectations about the way things “should” be. By choosing to stress out about events that were not in my control, I had two problems: the original event itself and my stress about things not being the way I (my parts) wanted them to be. When I noticed myself stressing out, I started to beat myself up for not demonstrating the equanimity a coach “should” have, and then I had three problems. And I would spiral downward from there.
The way to break the spiral is to interrupt it by noticing when we tense up and enter that fight-or-flight mode. That tension is a sign of our parts’ resistance to what is happening around us. If we instead pause to ground ourselves and reset our nervous system as described in exercise 3.3, we can let go of the resistance from our parts, let go of our “shoulds,” and accept the reality of our circumstances.
Here’s a small example of how I practice this: when I recently got caught out in the rain, I instinctively hunched up, and my shoulders went to my ears. My mind started complaining about how unlucky I was to be in the rain. When I noticed that tension and resistance, I relaxed my shoulders and told myself it was just water from the sky. The rain went from being a stressful, unpleasant experience to no big deal, because I closed the gap between expectations and reality by accepting the reality rather than resisting it.
Once again, let’s use our framework to transform our frustration with a situation into a choice:
What isn’t working for you?
Things are not the way I want them to be.
How are you the problem?
I (my parts) have an idea of how things “should” be, and those expectations are not being met. The problem is not in what’s happening, but in my resistance to changing my unrealistic expectations.
You have a choice.
Rather than insisting that things “should” conform to my expectations, I can choose to relax and accept reality as it is. Instead of wasting my energy on resisting reality, I can focus my energy on having my intended impact within the world as it is, and take action to bring the world closer to how I wish it were.
Now we can build from these foundational skills of accepting reality as it is to create different results by experimenting with changing our reality.
Exercise 4.4
You can practice acceptance on a daily basis by changing the temperature in the shower.
1. After you finish washing yourself, turn the temperature down a few degrees.
2. Try to stay present with your experience as the water hits your skin and resist the impulse to jump out, even though it initially feels extremely cold.
3. If you stay present for just a few seconds, your skin and nervous system will quickly adapt to the new “normal.” And if you turn the temperature up and down a couple times, you will build awareness that the hard part is not the adaptation but the resistance, the unwillingness to change the temperature and know you will be uncomfortable for a few seconds.
I regularly practice this exercise and find it helpful to build the skill of getting through an initially unpleasant change I know I will enjoy after I start, such as getting in a swimming pool on a hot day, starting a morning run, etc.
Chapter 5
Experiment and Learn
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
—E. L. Doctorow
Doctorow’s advice in the quote on the previous page applies just as much to life as to writing. You can’t see your whole future clearly laid out for you, but you can still navigate effectively with the limited view you have.
What will your journey be? I can’t answer that for you because I don’t know what will work for you specifically. Each of you has a different history, a different set of lived experiences that informs your behaviors (and unconscious parts), and a different set of goals. Your path is yours to find, as there is no single path that will work for everybody.
But I can help you answer that question for yourself through the process I am laying out in this book.
First, aim using the principles and exercises in chapter 1 to define what success looks like for you—what do you want to be observably different about your life? You need to pick a direction before you start driving, even if you don’t know exactly where you want to go.
Second, assess how you might be keeping yourself stuck in your current situation. In chapters 2 through 4, I showed you how to identify parts or voices that are holding you back internally, including the expectations you have of others. By accepting the current version of yourself and others, you now have a more accurate assessment of how you are making choices (sometimes unconsciously) to prevent change. In other words, you have a clearer picture of where you are starting your journey.
Now it’s time to start driving by experimenting with different choices you could make to try to change your life. In this chapter, I describe how to do that by sharing some experiments that can help you explore how to move in your desired direction.
I intentionally use the word “experiment” here because neither of us knows what will work for you until you try it. Think of it as a scientific experiment, in which you have a hypothesis about what might happen, but can only test the hypothesis by trying something different, and gathering data by observing what happens in response.
Calling these actions experiments also positions them as temporary and in the service of learning. If I said, “You should be doing this differently,” you might receive that as, “You are doing this wrong!” and get defensive, which would only get you more stuck. Instead, I ask you to design experiments that are safe, small scale, and time bound, so you can try them immediately and see what happens. If it doesn’t get the result you want, that’s still a success, as you have learned more about what works for you.
After each experiment, pause to reflect on what you learned from it, and then design a next experiment to continue your journey toward the life you desire. Each experiment helps keep you driving in your intended direction through the fog of life.
Exercise 5.1
Let’s design your first experiment by starting with what you learned in chapter 2, Accept Yourself, and chapter 3, Accept Your Parts, about the rules that are keeping you constrained in your current situation, and how it feels when your parts take over to enforce those rules.
An experiment you could try is:
1. Write down the actions (and associated rules) that are keeping you stuck in your current situation, in response to “How am I the problem?” You can look back at your answers in exercise 2.1 as a starting point.
2. Explore different possibilities for responding to those situations that are more aligned with the person you aim to be, rather than the currently constrained version of yourself as represented by your parts. Perhaps you can imagine how a person you respect might behave differently in those situations.
3. When you feel the physical signals that indicate your parts are taking over, as discovered in exercise 3.2, try to re-ground yourself through breathing or other actions to reconnect to the present moment.
4. Try a different action based on what you considered in step 2 above, e.g., if the rule was “I can never say no to my manager,” perhaps modify it to “I can never say no to my manager unless X, in which case I give myself permission to do Y instead.” This is where “You have a choice”: an opportunity to experiment by acting differently to see if you get a different result.
Similarly, if your challenge is in how others are keeping you stuck, you can try an experiment based on the exercises in chapter 4, Accept Others, such as:
1. Observe the other person as if you were a scientist observing their behavior as in Exercise 4.2, letting go of your (parts’) desires of how they “should” be. Using your observations, come up with a different way of dealing with them that assumes they will not change and will continue to react exactly the way they do today.
2. Make a clearer and more specific request of what you want them to do, as in Exercise 4.3. If they do not agree to your request, communicate each step of your reasoning to find the disconnection so that you can build forward from common ground.
Exercise 5.1 may seem a little abstract, so let me share concrete examples of experiments that have been helpful to my clients. You can skim through this chapter to find the experiments that feel relevant to you, as I have offered a variety of situations in the hopes that a few of them will resonate with your desired direction. Think of this chapter as a menu of experiments, from which you can choose the ones that appeal to you right now and leave the others for other readers (or for a future version of you).
Manage your commitments
One of the most common problems my clients face is being overcommitted. They face a classic issue experienced by high performers: when you are effective at getting things done, people bring you more things to do. If you keep adding new commitments without letting go of previous commitments, you will eventually reach your capacity and burn out, no matter how efficient and productive you are. I offer the experiment below to clients experiencing this problem.
What isn’t working for you?
Everybody else keeps asking me to do things, and I can’t get it all done!
How are you the problem?
I say yes to everything people ask me to do because one of my parts fears that if I say no, I will seem incompetent or uncaring.
You have a choice.
For one week, I will never say yes in the moment to a new commitment. Instead, I will say, “Let me check my other commitments and get back to you tomorrow.”
When I offer this experiment to overscheduled people, I ask them to write down each commitment that is being asked of them, and then take a look at the list at the end of the workday. Normally, when they do so, they realize that if they said yes to everything, they would have committed to several days’ worth of work, and it’s not sustainable to do that every day. In other words, the experiment is designed to illustrate the concept from chapter 2 that you can’t do it all. Each individual task seems manageable, but in aggregate, it’s too much.
