Emotional Processing

My personal trek into the unknown is beginning to reshape my understanding of human emotions and how we precess emotional matter.  In fact that last sentence is the problem most of us (myself included) seem to have about emotions.  We think we can process or understand our emotions - that they are messengers for what we are to do.   You know; see a bear charging us, run away; see an attractive person, move toward, etc. And while that may work to some extent, what I am learning is that we have gotten it backwards.  We do not process our emotions (or at least we should not try to process them), emotions process us.

I am not talking here about the pretense of indecision reflected in a person's saying, "I don't know how I feel about suchandso," or "Let me see how I feel about it." Those "emotions" are more often than not the result of cognitive processes; of the "I think therefore I feel" type of thinking.  What I am talking about, on the other hand, is the occurrence of a deeply felt emotion that comes upon us.  Take for example the experience of love or grief or the welling up of whatever moves us to tears in the presence of the indefinable.

We need to learn how to resist the urge to analyze what those mean and begin to let them do their work on us. To say that emotions move us may be more accurate that we first think.  What happens when we allow an emotion to work its magic on us is that it begins to transform our very being from the inside out. And our "normal" reaction to that transformation is to quickly avoid it, run away from it or do something about it.  Transformation is never pleasant - it is often more like pulling yourself inside out through your belly button!  But when we allow an emotion to work us, that is exactly what is possible.

Lovers may feel the love but may too often move to capture the object of their love instead of letting it grow them in new and unthought of ways. The former is an act of narcissism (not love) where the latter is transformative. Similarly suffering causes a knee-jerk reaction of doing whatever will stifle the suffering. And yet nothing will reinvent us like suffering. This is not to be confused with victimhood. There are times when suffering must be ended for the safety of the victim.  But when our ego takes charge (a bad habit it engages in for most of our waking hours), and it is our ego need that wants to end the suffering or claim the reward at having loved so well, then we are denying our emotions the power that is uniquely theirs. Ego is the enemy of transformation.

Most of the time allowing emotions the opportunity of doing the inner work feels like sitting in a pool of muck - all damp and smelly and dirty. What's worse is that emotions do not work on us in any linear fashion (step 1, 2, 3) as our logical egos would have it.  It is sporadic, coming and going in waves of differing times and intervals.  And it is not over until it is over.  As if that is not enough bad news for your ego, get this: once you start this work, there is no way out except through it. And a nasty corollary to that is that any part that you skip will come back to kick you in the butt when you least expect it.

But there is good news. On the other end, there is a rainbow of new opportunities and insights that were never visible through your ego-controlled lenses. New worlds and new ways of being wait for those willing to let themselves be sucked through the vortex of emotion-driven transformation. Be patient with yourself and gentle with your emotions. It is hard work, but the rewards are worth it.

Safely Behind Bars

I had a dream last night that resulted in seeing an analogy I was becoming aware of. I guess it all started because I had watched a trailer for a Disney film on African Cats – I have always loved and been fascinated by the big cats. I love their power and speed and what looks like the ruthlessness of their rule on the savannah. But that wasn’t really the point of my dream.

You see I do a lot of psychological testing of corporate leaders and executives and I tend to notice certain things about the aggregate scores over time. Leadership is missing a certain vitality. Though certainly on a one-at-a-time level some leaders have a little of one part and others have a little of another, but as a whole, there are some core essentials missing from our leadership. Worse yet, most tests aren’t even set up to measure them. But I am coming to believe that they are essentials.


I am talking about passion, love and faith – words that are not even spoken much in corporate realms. The closest we tend to come to that is looking at committed action (perhaps a version of passion). These are the big cats of human experience! We are attracted to them and will stare endlessly at movies about them in cinematic portrayal, somewhat akin to spending hours ooh-ing and aw-ing at a National Geographic special on the big cats of the savannah.

But we don’t dare get too close to these wild things. They are dangerous and unpredictable. Take passion, for example. Passion has gotten a bad rap of late; perhaps attributable to the many CSI/police dramas on TV that portray passion as the source of murder – crimes of passion, they are called. The motive: passion run amok. But passion is actually defined as a state of heightened emotionality driven by some external force – almost alien to our nature or common behavior. Passion overpowers us and takes control, we think. But can this wild beast be brought inside? Can we truly “live with passion,” as Tony Robbins so often exhorts us to do? How many of those who I test and coach would I claim have some degree of passion running through their leadership? I’ll tell you: very, very few. Passion scares employees – passion scares most of us. Nice to watch, but that cat could rip you apart!

Then there is love. What a magnificent word; the source of so many songs; the foundation of philosophical stands; the mandate of every great teacher or sage. All you need is love. Yet it is curiously missing from our management and nowhere to be seen in testing. “Does this manager exhibit signs of love; does he or she truly love employees?” Can you imagine the reaction to execs coming across that item on an evaluation? No, love, too has gotten a bad name. It is too strong a word to be allowed into the realms of corporate leadership.

Ken Blanchard recently wrote a book with Southwest Airlines’ Colleen Barrett called Lead with LUV (using Southwest’s ticker symbol LUV instead of the word love it stands for). Southwest Airlines is one of the few companies we can all point to that actually talks about love as a leadership principle. And while there are probably many more smaller and far less known companies who actually dare to use that word, the scales are balanced pretty heavily in the other direction. What is so fearful about using love as our foundation of leadership? I’ll tell you: love is vulnerable and brings out the vulnerability in the other. In today’s litigious society, that threat could place someone at risk – why that could be construed as a hostile work environment! Really! Hostile? People fear love! That’s why it is the second of the big cats..

But the stealthy killer of the pack is faith. Faith, unfortunately at a conceptual level, has been stolen and distorted by fear mongers and evangelical ne’er-do-well’s to mean buying into some pre-packaged pseudo-religious dogma that has no basis in truth or spirit. So right out of the starting blocks this killer is marked. But even without that, faith stands in defiance of rationality. Faith is holding onto some truth when there is absolutely no evidence for it. On the positive side, it is the essence of The Secret, but against that is any business or scientific “fact-based” logic. You can’t build a business on faith – no bank would fund that proposal!

Yet people of faith (real faith) can and have moved mountains. They seem to have uncanny luck and “get all the breaks.” They have “the eye of the tiger.” In actuality perhaps they just see what their more logic-bound sisters and brothers can’t see, but their success and their faith scares us. We fear that we have to buy into some Jesus stuff or God language, and then what would people think. Yet despite that, there are many examples of faith-based companies that, strangely or not, are still quite successful.

Yea, those are the wild cats – the big guys we love to look at on NatGeo, but would not necessarily want in our house as pets. So what do we do with them? Well, just like the real African cats, we put them safely behind bars. And that’s what I saw in my dream: passion, love and faith safely locked away for visitors to come and visit on Sunday or holidays. Good Pastors and Rabbis get to use these words and play them out as harmless abstracts for us to consider. Harmless – and behind bars.

Passion: the King of the beasts – a thousand pounds of pure power! Yeah, harmless!
Love: that can overtake you with the speed of the cheetah, and you don’t have a place to hide! Not exactly what I’d call safe and harmless!
And Faith: with all of the stealth of a leopard, just waiting on the branch overhead to spring on you! I don’t think so!

So we cage them and keep them safe and out of harm’s way. And they don’t appear on any test or in any boardroom, and certainly not walking around among us – they are just too dangerous! Indeed!

What Are Your "Stones?"

Here’s an interesting twist on faith as pointed out to me by a great mentor. An often overlooked tidbit in one version of the Easter story, two women were making their way to the burial site of their master early that morning apparently with the intention of anointing the body with oils and perfumes to keep it from smelling up the countryside. And one says to the other, “Who will roll away the stone?” The story goes on to have them find the task already done when they arrive – and we get caught up in the whole angel dialogue and risen lord thing.


But wait – there was the message there – right there; and we stepped over it again. You see, the women thought, “there is a big stone in the way of our practicing our faithful ritual. We want to do what is right, but, hey, we can’t because of the stone.” Ain’t that the truth! There are these big stones in the way of our faithful practices. Most of mine live in my head but some consist of things outside: social expectations, my job, family responsibilities and the like. They are big stones – heavy stones that I don’t think I can move all by myself.

And the howling error that always confronts us (me, if I am willing to tell the truth here) is that the stone is removed for us. Always! It is just gone. That's not what I think - I am certain that there are these things stopping me. And from an egocentric perspective, it appears as though there is a barrier – that there will always be some barrier that I have to muscle out of the way. But that is how I do things. I think I have to do it or it won’t get done. That is not God’s way. That is not how the Universe works and always works. There is no barrier – it has already been moved from my path. Gone. Poof! Not there! The stones are all in my head.

How heavy my head must be with all of those boulders and stones in there – all the ones I have had to move (or thought I had to) in the past and all of the ones I am ever so ready to place in my way as the necessary hurdle to make me worthy of the prize. But the prize is already ours, the stone is already removed, and the prize (surprise) is there waiting for me to come around the corner.

Gaping Chest Wound

I note with great interest our reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis. How we see the "problem" and how we address it are very telling. We tend as a people to see big problems as what Douglas Adams called SEPs (Sombody Else's Problem) and with that comes a convenient blame that we can affix to the culprit, BP.
But more than that, we seem to be seeing the problem as a separate and distinct entity apart from ourselves. Like so many of our human ailments: cancer, depression, AIDS - you name it - we naievely believe that: a) it is not integrally interwoven into how we live our lives, and b) that there is or can be created a pill (a solution) that can make it go away, without any other effort on our part than simply swallowing it.
How foolish can we be? First of all, how foolish it is to think that poking holes in our body will not have some disasterous results at some point; that it somehow will not result in our bleeding to death. More importantly, how foolish it is to view the earth and a separate entity, an object here for our taking, and not the core and source of our very being as a spicies. In our dualisic logic, we have come to believe that what is not "this" must be "that," that what is not me is other and therefore could possibly be mine or at least used by me without any cost to me. We have failed the first great cosmic rule: that all is one and inseparable from itself. This truth, taught by every great sage that has grown out of this life form and moved about within its veins, is undeniable. We have forgotten that we are merely some six billion hairs growing on the surface of our collective body.
And how foolish can we be to think that this ailment we now face can be healed by placng a bandaid on the hole? We have a gaping chest wound that has punctured our lungs and heart and, with the blood gushing out at a million barrels a minute, we will think to stuff some gauze in it. We hope - in vain I fear - that there is a cure. Where is the Prozac to make this better? Isn't there some antibiotic to make it go away so we can get back to feeding our egos and consuming ourselves?
I am so sorry to be negative. I am so embarrassed to be part of that collective mind that believes this. I want to kick and punch my way out but I can't. I am a part of the whole. I, too, am bleeding to death. I will - like each of you - climb into my oil consuming automobile later this morning and drive off to work, and somehow pretend not to know that I/we are dying.
There is no pill.
There is no individual fault.
And there is no individual way for one person, one company or one country to make it better.
Our only hope is we and us, and to see that this blood spilling out is related to Darfur, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine and all of the other 90 some wars and blood-letting ceremonies in which we are now engaged, as well as to the deforestation of the Amazon, the melting ice caps.
Oh people, join hands, wake up, help out. This is serious.

It's Just Perfect!

Last week I gave a lecture at the Sloan Business School of MIT on the topic of rapid assimilation into a leadership or management position. Throughout the talk I fielded questions on disharmony and disagreements - the thought being that if one has done a good job selecting and interviewing, there should be a lowered probability of problems. At one point I even asked the audience how many people had the experience of being hired for a job and finding out after the fact that either the job had radically changed or that there were some deep dark, and untold secrets that had not been revealed during the interviewing process (nearly all the hands went up).

Ignoring the irrational expectation that a company should reveal its warts prior to your becoming an insider, the really big problem that lies at the base of this discussion is a belief that a perfect world is one in which all live in harmony. As far as I can tell that belief is the single most destructive belief in the world. It certainly has been the source of more marital problems than any other belief! It just isn't how things are. We are each unique in our being and in our understanding of our world view. Just as no two fingerprints are the same, no two personalities are the same. That is the fun part of life. I wouldn't want to marry someone just like me (how boring is that?) and it would almost feeling like talking to myself were I to work with someone just like me.

Believing that we should have no disagreements also stifles creativity. Nothing really creative can come from agreeing with each other. But in disagreeing - and doing so vehemently - we are forced to find a new solution. The more invested we are in the two poles of a disagreement, the greater our creativity has to be. Our inability to engage in disagreements is further exacerbated by our not knowing how to disagree, debate, and find solutions without taking things personally. Our society - the ME society - has taught us that everything is about us. "If you like my clothes, you must like me" translates into "if you don't like my ideas, you must hate me." And now I can tweet you with what I am doing at any given instant. C’mon: Do we really think that our lives are so important that anyone would be interested in knowing that it is time to take a shower or that you are standing in line at the Stop and Shop? I hate to be so blunt, but we need to get over it! Life is not about you – your life is not about you. Life is to be lived in service to and relationship with others. And relationship is all about working out the differences.

I don’t know if my audience heard the message, but the answer to “what if you and your boss disagree?” and “what if the mentor you have is at odds with the person you report to?” was, and still is, forever, “work it out!” That is the stuff of life, and that is just perfect!