CHOICE POINTS FOR CONSCIOUS USE OF SELF—PART 1

Conscious use of self, described in our previous blog, calls for learning how to be aware of and direct our beliefs, our emotions, our thoughts, and our behavior. These are the primary points of choice that allow us to consciously manage ourselves. The choices we make at those points directly impact how well we manage or create change in our personal or organizational worlds.

Unfortunately, most of us normal human beings have only begun to develop full command of these tools of self. Most of us respond automatically to many situations where our goals would be better served by greater awareness and consciousness about how we are using our selves.  Our automatic or habitual reactions are based on responses that were successful in some (generally unconscious, often childhood-based) past experiences. However, when applied too broadly and unconsciously to current situations, we find that the impact of too many of our behaviors fall far from our desired results.

How we use ourselves in one situation may or may not be very effective in another, though similar, situation. Over reliance on past experience is a significant pitfall to the flexibility we need to effectively work our way through today’s world of constant change. To gain this needed flexibility a deeper understanding of the choice points is useful.

Every action we take is directed by some combination of emotions and thoughts. Those emotions and thoughts are directed by our database of beliefs. The database is constructed from conclusions from past experiences, socializations (Edie says, “We’ve been duped by society”), and ideas of our own invention. For example, imagine that I want members of a team for which I am responsible to decrease the time they spend in conflict and increase their productivity. First, I need to determine what I’m doing (my actions, my behavior) that is contributing to the way things are rather than what I want, and what I could do that would work better. To find that out, I ask my team’s members. If they get that my curiosity is genuine, they’ll tell me. Now, I can consciously choose the behaviors that work rather than those that don’t.

Part 2 to be continued next week

Guest Post: How To Counteract Racism/Ageism/Sexism in Hiring

This headline assumes that one accepts that discrimination in hiring still exists. Well, I was recently asked to write an essay on whether I think racism in hiring still exists, how I feel about it, and how it can be counteracted. A portion of that essay follows:

“Do I believe that racism in hiring still exists? Yes, I believe that racism – and ageism and sexism – in hiring still exists. I also understand how easy it is to wonder if these are at play in the absence of sound and current data in specific situations.” (Is that recruiter not calling me back because s/he’s discriminating against me? Or is s/he just rude? Or swamped out of his/her gourd?)

“How do I feel about it? It is frustrating – as a job seeker, and as a hiring manager, and as a recruiter. It is frustrating to wonder – and sometimes not even need to wonder – why excitement turns to chill, why enthusiasm turns to silence, why a pending job offer turns to excuses. It makes me scared and angry that circumstances beyond my control affect me or friends and colleagues, angry that stupidity and excuses can be allowed to win out over fairness and hard work.

“Those are the easy questions.

“It isn’t actually that difficult to determine who is the best candidate for the job – if one is open to people who are different from one’s self. A good hiring process focuses on being clear about the requirements of the position, the duties of the position, the skills required to fulfill those duties, the ideal amount of experience required, and the “stuff you can’t teach” such as self-management, communication skills, analytical skills, and values such as honesty, work ethic, and so on.

“But these criteria for determining who is the best candidate for the job assume that there is not an unspoken criterion that the candidate looks like the interviewer. Humans are hardwired in their lizard brains to gravitate to those who are similar. Differences are dangerous in an eat-or-be-eaten-world.

“The good news is that we are not lizards. We are human, with a lot more to our brains than the lizard portion. We can utilize those higher brains to overlook or – better yet – appreciate differences.

“Which brings us to the hard question about racism in hiring: How do you counteract it? By fostering a sense of curiosity. At all stages and in all of the players, and first of all in ourselves. If we are willing, we can find out that life is just so much more interesting when we interact with people who are different. Not only that, but we can learn so much more. We must be curious as interviewers, and as job seekers, and as co-workers. It is not the job of just one side to be curious – we must all be willing to be curious. Anger has its place, but curiosity is more effective. Secondly, we must foster curiosity in others, by encouraging them to be interested, by helping them feel safe, and by lovingly calling attention to fear and lack of curiosity when they pop up. Finally, we must encourage curiosity in children so that we have less work to do in that area when they are adults.

“Legislation and political correctness will never solve the problem at its source. But we can do it through being conscious of our own tendencies, fostering curiosity, and providing opportunities for learning.”

I admit this makes practicing curiosity sound easy. I’ve been asked, “If it’s that easy, why don’t people do it more often?”

That’s a good question. I think the answer is: It is easy. But I also think there are several reasons more people don’t practice curiosity. The first is just habit; it’s easy to get comfortable. Another, more insidious reason is that we think we know the truth, and we think we know about people who are different from us.

But I think the main reason is Fear. Fear of admitting I don’t know something. Fear of being wrong (and of people finding out). Fear of being punished for not conforming. Fear of looking Dumb. Fear of having my worldview changed, which can feel like chaos.

Being curious takes a little courage. Courage to be vulnerable, courage to change my mind, and courage to create a safe environment for others to be curious. But being curious is also fun, and it makes life a lot more interesting. Are you up for it?

Susan T. Blake is an organization development professional and coach whose background includes management experience and a tour of duty as an award-winning recruiter. A graduate of the Triple Impact Practitioners Program, Susan writes about systems thinking, team building, curiosity, management lessons she’s learned from spiders and her cats, and other topics that make her wonder in her blog at http://susanTblake.com.

Conscious Use of Self Requires…Intentionality

Intentionality as conscious use of self gives us the ability to choose from moment to moment what we want to accomplish.

Do want to prove our rightness or righteousness? Do we want to maintain or build a relationship? Do we want to pretend that we know what we are doing? Do we want to learn something new? Do we want to protect ourselves? Do we want to improve productivity? Each of those goals might be appropriate for any given circumstance so there is no right or wrong here. What is here is the opportunity to be consciously choiceful about our intentions so that we might direct our behavior accordingly.

From childhood most of us were given only minimal choice opportunities. As infants we had the choice of cry or not cry, but we don’t think there was much consciousness involved with that back then, though we may have consciously found it to be a useful tactic a year or so later. Mostly, we had little choice but to follow the dictates of our parents or other caregivers about what to do and how to behave. In school it was quite the same thing, as it was in church or temple. Some of us did choose to rebel, but doing what our parents and teachers didn’t want us to do did not really offer a broad range of options. Most of us longed for adulthood when we would finally be free to make our own choices—only to discover that the world of work gave us a series of bosses whose dictates we had to follow if we wanted to keep our jobs.

Through all of these processes we are socialized and conditioned via reward and punishment to be nice, work hard, and follow all of the other rules of the institutions around us and society in general. Some of us tried to walk a road less traveled only to return to the beaten path later. Mostly, we’ve been duped by society “to go along to get along” and be otherwise obedient whether it is satisfying and productive—and too often neither. With so little practice in choosing our own intentions it is often simply easier to follow the crowd. Even at the personal level we think we’ve chosen to “never do that again” or “from now on to” only find that we are still not exercising, still eating too much, or still not doing whatever we said we intended to do or still doing what we intended to no longer do.

Unfortunately, habitual or socialized behavior maintains the status quo. It changes nothing. Only through conscious and deliberate intentionality are we able maintain a selected focus that would have us believe, think, feel, and behave in ways that will

• Enhance our relationships with others,
• Make our teams more effective, and
• Make our organizations more productive and satisfying.

We can choose and maintain the intention to empower ourselves, to play infinitely with others, to build personal and organizational support systems. In doing so we increase our ability to contract, gather data, intervene, evaluate, and disengage more effectively with ourselves, others, groups, and organizations.

The First Discipline of Planned Change: Conscious Use of Self

The primary tool that anyone wishing to manage change in a human system uses is the configuration of intellectual, emotional, and physical energies that that particular person brings to the situation. That includes her personality, her various abilities (particularly her ability to learn), and her idiosyncrasies.

Most of us have only begun to recognize and develop full command of ourselves. Most of us respond to many situations automatically. These automatic or habitual responses are the result of over-learning. Over-learning is the extrapolation of an appropriate learning from past experiences and applying it too broadly to other situations that may seem similar, even identical, when they are not at all similar. Often they are not similar simply because we are amazingly different from when we originally learned the response. Accordingly, the impacts of many of our actions fall far from our intended results.

In the processes of effective change management we need all the personal flexibility we can muster. How we behave in one situation or with one person is not likely to be very effective with another, though similar, situation or person. To manage change in human systems we must be able to tailor our behavior to the immediate situation in such a manner that it will move us and those around us toward whatever change goal we have in mind.

To manage our behavior, however, is not a simple matter. Consider that:

• Our behavior is directed by our emotions.
• Our emotions are directed by our thoughts.
• Our thoughts are directed by our belief systems through which we understand ourselves and the world around us.

How often do we believe we have no choice about what to do in a particular situation? In fact, with conscious use of self we can make choices at the level of our behavior, our emotions, our thoughts, or our belief systems. The further along this continuum of choice the greater our ability to choose effective courses of action rather than follow our habitual patterns. As we move toward mastery of these aspects of ourselves, we will be more and more able to behave in such a manner that the systems within which we wish to manage change will respond in ways consonant with our goals and intentions.

We want to pay attention to three particular areas of conscious use of self—intentionality, connectivity and ego management. We will look at each of these in subsequent posts, so stay tuned!