Overcoming Your Fear of Working to Connect

Fear of not connecting with another person, fear of not making an impact, fear of speaking and having no one listen, is the old resistance, dressed up in a new outfit.

It’s really just another form of hiding.

Attempt to connect.

Fulfill your promises.

Try to make an impact.

Speak whether anyone listens or not.

By the time you’re done fighting the resistance, you’ll care so much about the connections you do have, that hiding from doing the hard work of connecting, impacting, and speaking, will be dwarfed.

You don’t have to own all the corners. Just a few.

Just enough.

Dive Into Yourself

The deepest dive you can do is into yourself.

If you want to find the resistance to changes that need to be made in your organization, it starts with you.

If you want to discover why other people aren’t resonating with your story, it starts with you.

If you want to know how to empathize with others and their plights, it starts with you.

If you want to understand how to manage conflicts and how to be satisfied when conflicts can’t (or won’t) be resolved, it starts with you.

If you want to advance in your career, social, financial, or even in your community life, it begins with you.

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The trouble, of course, is that understanding begins with you. And you think that you already know who you are and that you don’t need to go any further. Or even worse, you think that other people need to conform to you because you’re the one that knows the answers to their toughest questions, not them.

Self-awareness is the most underrated leadership trait, and that’s because on top it looks easy, but when you go deep into yourself, it becomes more and more uncomfortable.

Gaining self-awareness means going into your family, your friends, and even the systems and organizations you work in, make money in, and/or recreate in, and asking them the critical questions that matter:

  • What am I blind to here in this system?
  • What do I accept that has been told to me as reality?
  • What can I reject?
  • What are the “rules” or “standards” or “expectations” that “everyone” conforms to in this environment and do those work for me, or am I just accepting them because it’s less comfortable than not questioning?
  • What do I owe others?
  • What do others owe me?
  • What are my responsibilities here?
  • What are my obligations in this environment?
  • How does being here (wherever “here” is) match up with the story I’ve told myself about how my life and experiences should work?

Self-awareness should not be confused with behaving selfishly. Selfishness comes about when we seek to deny someone else’s humanity and pretend that the interaction is a zero-sum transaction. Self-awareness is the quiet, mindful, anticipatory work we do by ourselves, internally that positions us for success in relationships where the opportunities and possibilities can be expanded rather than retracted.

The deepest dive you can do is into yourself.

Dive in.

Dissatisfaction Times Vision Times First Steps Must Be Greater Than the Resistance

The equation that drives change is simple:

Dissatisfaction times Vision times First Steps must be greater than the Resistance to the impact of all three combined or else change efforts falter.

There are plenty of dissatisfied people in your workplace, your work group, or even just your organization.

There are people who insist that providing negative feedback is the only way to encourage organizational growth and they provide it liberally.

There are people who have been dissatisfied for years in your organization; who have made brief, or even faltering, attempts at change, but have been stymied and have now surrendered.

There are people inside your organization who claim they are dissatisfied, but who are mimicking the sounds of dissatisfaction as a political power move to angle for a better position at the organizational table.

There are people with vision in your workplace, your work group, and your organization. But this vision is hazy, or they are easily distracted by the next “hot” leadership initiatives, or their vision can be compromised with just a little more money or promotion.

There are people who take first steps and attend training, workshops, and seminars.

They read books and articles, combing the internet for advice and guidance about how to overcome the organizational ennui that holds back change.

There are people who take the same first steps, but their enthusiasm doesn’t go anywhere.

They stop at memorizing the “how-to” listicle and when trying to apply the emotional jujitsu against the resistance in their organizations, they experience limited success.

But these elements, dissatisfaction, vision, and first steps, must be greater than the sum of the organizational resistance to them. Or else, the changes that you are seeking inside of your organization, your work group, or even the team that is inside your sphere of influence, won’t happen.

The resistance to change is pernicious, persistent, and it never gives up. The resistance to change is sneaky and sly and sometimes comes in the form of well-meaning people and situations that appear as though they are helping your cause of change when in reality they are hurting it.

No great change happens without conflict. And no great conflict can happen without the resistance being overcome.

And if you think that it can, then you are bound to wind up stuck in the same place of dissatisfaction where you initially began your change journey.

Getting Wisdom From There to Here

The thing about getting to the resolution of a conflict situation is that it is a long road, from the initiation of a conflict to a resolution of a conflict.

And since it’s a long road, the bumps, the twists and the turns are what interests us as spectators. Those of us in the audience are here to witness the journey, not the outcome.

Except: When all the audience is interested in hearing about—or giving their limited attention to—is a boiled down summation of the process, with a list of steps for how to get to end and be done, then there is little about experiencing (or explaining) the moments along the road that can hold the audience’s interest.

The path of conflict requires those of us who have been along the path to provide wisdom—and not shortcuts—to encourage and inspire people to walk the same path. And to stick with walking it when the outcome seems in doubt.

The bumps along the road include opportunities to attain the following traits and skills (in alphabetical order):

Candor

Clarity

Courage

Deep competence

Emotional Intelligence

Forgiveness

Grace

Humility

Indomitable Spirit

Perseverance

Resiliency

Satisfaction (from a job well done)

Self-awareness

Self-control

Wisdom

There will always be adversity. You will always have conflicts, trials, and tribulations. Be of good cheer, and show others the path.

Because there ain’t no app, shortcut, or listicle, for getting the wisdom from walking the path.

Three Places to Thrash

When faced with a project there are three places to thrash:

Early—before the project begins.

Middle—as the project is proceeding.

Late—as the project ends.

When you (or your team) thrashes early, brainstorming becomes a way to develop new ideas. Speed and immediacy become the primary goals of early thrashing: Speed to actionable ideas and immediacy to the implementation of action, moving toward accomplishing end-of-project goals.

When you (or your team) thrashes in the middle of a project, brainstorming becomes a place to hide. Hiding emotionally, “getting to know your team,” or struggling to decide about the efficacy or practicality of an idea, become the unstated, primary goals. Speed becomes less important than looking good to peers, and groupthink really kicks in at this point, bogging down the implementation process.

When you (or your team) thrashes at the end of a project, brainstorming becomes a place of panic, anxiety, and on some teams (or with you) a place of abject fear. The combination of pressure to ship something out the door encourages a mindset and attitude focused around speed (but for negative reasons) and impatience with people and processes. The implementation process recedes in the face of the attitude of “just get it done.”

Thrashing—that is brainstorming a direction, deciding on an approach, planning a process, managing opinions and conflicts, and implementing a plan for action—should be done early, rather than late if you’re really interested (or your team is really interested) in shipping a product, idea, or service out the door and direct to the market.

Courage in the “Ah-Ha” Moment

The moment when your mind opens, a new idea resonates with you at an emotional frequency you didn’t know you possessed; this is the “A-HA” moment.

Dismissing an idea that doesn’t open your mind, that doesn’t resonate with you at any emotional frequency, actively rejecting the effort of the other party to convince or persuade you; this is a form of hiding.

Chasing the moment when the idea opens your mind, chasing that moment of resonance above all other moments in an interpersonal interaction with a situation you didn’t previously understand; this is a form of hiding.

The people who chase the “A-HA” moment blindly (the dopamine high) or the people who reject the idea that might lead to the “A-HA” moment (the resistance) both need to worry less about thrashing around with dopamine or resistance, and move their emotional energy to courage.

Courage to be open.

Courage to be honest.

Courage to be clear.

Courage to know the “A-HA” moment is there, but not needing the moment to manifest immediately—or desperately.

This courage is in short supply. But it always has been.

Seeking Validation

When someone asks you for validation about their approach to managing a conflict, what they are really asking for is reassurance that they are doing the right thing.

But since validation can only come from gatekeepers, and since gatekeepers have significantly less power in the world now than they ever have before, seeking validation is really an empty pursuit.

And since there is never enough reassurance that the right path has been taken, asking for validation—but really seeking reassurance—is a recipe for hiding from making the decisions that will move a conflict forward toward management and maybe resolution.

Instead of offering validation (or reassurance) offer opportunities and challenges to those who are hiding to have the courage to come out into the light, to make a decision, and to ship a solution that will be good enough for the conflict they are in.

Right Questions Right Answers

The issue is not the questions we ask.

The issue is knowing the right questions to ask, at the right time, and about the right things.

If you don’t know what the right questions are to ask because you don’t understand what’s happening in a conflict situation, then just blindly questioning isn’t a sign of curiosity.

It’s a sign of foolishness.

If you don’t know what the right time to ask a question is, because you don’t understand timing, don’t care about it, or are in a hurry to score a rhetorical point, then just shouting out a question isn’t a sign of resistance or “speaking truth to power.”

It’s a sign of poor intuition.

If you don’t know what the right things are to question, because you lack the knowledge, the time, the resources, or the emotional energy to do the research to find out about the background of the topic area you are questioning, then the act of questioning isn’t a form of discovery.

It’s a sign of lack of preparation.

Three ideas here can help for knowing the right questions to ask, at the right time, and about the right things:

  • Be curious but not naïve—or blind.
  • Chase intuition, then facts, then knowledge and wrap that around persuasion.
  • Don’t ever ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.

And one extra: If asked a question, answer it honestly, truthfully, kindly, but firmly and with conviction.

The Hard Thing About The Hard Questions

The hard questions aren’t ones that you just need to think about harder, to get to a binary answer.

Binary answers.

“What the other party wants to hear” answers.

“Feel good” answers.

Wrong answers.

Right answers.

The compelling issue is not that the questions are hard, or that they are scary.

The issue is that the answers frighten you because of their implications around responsibility, accountability, safety, and security.

But the only way out of a conflict is to go further in.

Thinking harder about a binary answer isn’t the way to get to more resolution.

Neither is thinking about how to structure the answer to get the other party on your side.

Sometimes, answering the hard question really requires you to pick an answer, stand up, and courageously defend it.

If The Process Doesn’t Interest You Too Much…

If the process of resolving a conflict doesn’t interest you too much…

If you just want to “be done with it’ already…

If you “just don’t care how it stops” just that it’s over…

If you have “no dog in this fight”…

If you are “just a disinterested observer”…

Then in reality you are a spectator and your behavior of standing around (metaphorically) observing the conflict and its results, and not adding to either getting to resolution, reconciliation, or management of the conflict at hand, is causing more harm than good.

We don’t need more gawkers at car wrecks.

We’ve got enough of those already.

We need more people willing to stop by the side of the road of a conflict and help to get the parties to their best selves.

Or, at the least, be willing to dial 911 as they fly by on their way to other, more pressing issues.