Who are you at your best?
Before you read any further, take a few moments to write down a half dozen of the most salient adjectives. Don’t hold back. Give yourself credit where it’s due.
When you’ve finished, write down a series of adjectives that describe you at your worst. Don’t go easy on yourself.
So which one is the real you?
Plainly, the answer is both. The problem is that most of us don’t often feel like our best selves, and don’t much want to acknowledge our worst selves.
The quality I see mostly rarely among the many leaders I meet is real self-awareness â€" a fearless willingness to look at what motivates their behavior, and a recognition of the impact they have on those they lead, particularly when it’s destructive.
We each have a second self that arises when we’re feeling a sense of threat and, most specifically, a threat to our sense of value. Our automatic physiological response to any threat is to move into fight or flight, during which we move from rational to reactive. Our prefrontal cortex shuts down and our amygdala â€" what the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has called “fear central†â€" takes over. We move into survival mode, often without being aware of it.
Just think about the last time you felt you were pushed into negative emotions â€" triggered, in other words â€" by something someone did. Can you connect it to the experience of feeling devalued by the experience?
No one is immune to these threats, even the healthiest and most secure among us â€" not just because our sense of value is so precious to us, but also because it can be so easily upended. That may be especially true for leaders, who often seek external power precisely as a response to an inner feeling of powerlessness.
In the absence of self-awareness, each of us has an infinite capacity for self-deception. It is painful and embarrassing to behave badly. In defending our value, we end up using our prefrontal cortex not to better understand and take responsibility for our reactive behaviors, but rather to rationalize, minimize and blame others for them.
Power corrupts in large part because it isolates leaders from the need to face reality. I’ve seen this play out in a range of pernicious variations.
I’ve met leaders who forever trumpet their own accomplishments and even take credit for the work of others. Others need to control every decision and make it clear that they’re the smartest ones in the room. I’ve met chief executives who are relentlessly critical and rarely appreciative, unaware of the toll their comments take. Still others never say anything negative to any of their executives, avoiding conflict altogether, only to undercut them behind their backs.
Whatever the variation, the underlying explanation is most often a lack of awareness that each of these behaviors is a way of asserting value in the face of an inner experience of insecurity. The problem is that these executives are often filling their own needs at the expense of meeting the needs of those they lead.
It certainly doesn’t have to be this way. Not long ago, I was working with the senior executives at a large company. We were talking about fight or flight and survival mode. The leader of this team mentioned that he rarely let himself move into negative emotion, and that on the rare occasions when he did, he quickly moved out of it. No one contradicted him. The next day, discussing a difficult issue the team had been trying to resolve, the leader raised his hand.
“I see now that I have been in survival over this,†he said, “and that is because my value felt at risk.†It was a courageous moment, and a powerful one. A wave of relief spread visibly across the faces of the others in the room.
In effect, this leader was taking responsibility for his worst self, uncomfortable and vulnerable as that made him feel. What it gave his team was implicit permission to talk more honestly about his effect on them â€" and about their experiences of being triggered into negative emotions.
The universal fear that acknowledging our missteps will be read as weakness almost always turns out to mistaken. Far more typically, it increases trust â€" and makes us feel better about ourselves.
I know this from my own experience as a leader. When I realize that I’ve done something reactive, and potentially hurtful, to a member of my team, what I feel is shame. My first instinct is to find an excuse, or simply get away from the feeling. But when I simply own my behavior, there’s nothing left to defend.
Two things have helped me most. The first is something I call the Golden Rule of Triggers: Whatever you feel compelled to do, don’t. Instead, take a deep breath to quiet your physiology so you are in a position to make a choice about how to act, rather than simply reacting.
I’ve also found it valuable to stop thinking of myself solely as “good†or “bad†â€" and instead to accept that I’m capable of both. The family therapist Terry Real calls this “holding yourself in warm regard despite your imperfections.â€
In the end, it comes back to self-awareness. The best leaders, I believe, are those who are willing to see more and exclude less.
Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of the Energy Project and the author, most recently, of “Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live.†Twitter: @tonyschwartz
