The conversation is etched in my brain because it shaped my life. It was one of those times something is said that is so clear, true, and powerful that the moment you hear it, you sense your life may never be quite the same.
Here’s the story.
A company I love and do a lot of work with is becoming a “Deliberately Developmental Organization” as defined by Harvard professors, authors, and consultants Robert Kegan, PhD., and Lisa Lahey, PhD. There, we have 180 people working in 29 cohorts of 5–7 people each, doing consistent, deep, personal development work together in a way that serves the business. (Sara calls this type of model as “peer development groups”.)
The CEO is in a peer development group with his direct reports, and he asked Robert Kegan a question which prompted the answer that rocked my world. The CEO said, “Bob, some of the people in my cohort get a lot out of it. Some don’t get much at all. What gives?”
Bob’s reply was piercing and revealing:
Well, for a person to get a lot out of this process they need to know three things…
1. They need to be crystal clear on the most important thing they need to accomplish at work this year.
2. They need to know how they tend to screw up at work. And,
3. They need to make a direct connection between 1 and 2.
If they know those three things, they will get a lot out of this process.”
Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you, but I’m pretty sure it re-arranged my brain. I spend a lot of time supporting people (and supporting people who are supporting their peers) in changing behaviors that have been tripping them up for years, maybe even for their entire working life.
I can now so clearly articulate what practical personal development looks like that I can serve people much, much more effectively. Further, I am more clear on how to approach my own personal development work. Bob’s clear and succinct response lit up something for me. As I write about this for you, it has me thinking of one of my favorite songs…
That was a wonderful remark
I had my eyes closed in the dark
I sighed a million sighs
I told a million lies, to myself, to myself”
— Van Morrison, Wonderful Remark
When those three things are clear, remarkable things become possible. And as smart and well-intentioned as most people are, at least one of those three things is too fuzzy. Sometimes more than one. Sometimes, all three.
Good, Anytime. And a Great Way to Start a Year!
My colleague Pamela and I are in the process of welcoming those 180 people across those 29 peer development groups into a new year. It is a wonderful time to get them grounded, focused, and intentional for their personal development work in 2019. So, I reached back to those three questions. And, for reasons I won’t go into here, I expanded those three questions to seven. And, of course, I answered the seven questions myself.
Use these questions any time of year. Use them any time you feel like your personal development efforts have gone flat, gotten sideways, or seem to be moving backwards. Or use them to orient and renew your personal development efforts as you move into a new year. Regardless, I encourage you to use the seven questions now, no matter where you are in the year at the time you are reading this.
The Seven Powerful Questions
I’ll give you these seven questions to you straight up and then give some quick points to think about. I could say a lot about each one — this could be an online course in and of itself. But here I will keep it short and sweet. Then I will give you my own answers as an example.
1. What is the #1 thing you want to accomplish in 2019?
2. What Is the #1 behavior that may (or will) trip you up?
3. What is the #1 behavior you intend to do instead?
4. What is the key fear or anxiety about stopping 2 and doing 3?
5. What is the thing you tell yourself to justify continuing 2 and not doing 3?
6. What are the benefits of overcoming 4 and 5, so you can flip 2 to 3, so you can better accomplish 1? (And the downside of not?)
7. How will you “bridge” the above into your life?
Here are some quick points regarding the above:
If you struggle with question 1 above, you are not alone. But there is an incredible power to cutting away the confusion and conflicting priorities, and landing on it. The ONE thing. And then committing to it. Two resources that can help you with this are the books Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown and The ONE Thing by Gary Keller. Good books to re-read once a year!
Questions 2, 3, 4, and 5 are about your behaviors and their source (which we call your internal operating system, or IOS). Most of us haven’t a clue that we have an IOS. We think that we are choosing our behavior. We aren’t aware that most of the time, our behavior is arising from an internal system… our thoughts, emotions, and instincts… operating behind the scenes and unconsciously in a powerful, interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent way.
*You can learn more about questions 2, 3, 4, and 5 and the way they hang together by reading Chapter Six of the book An Everyone Culture.* Or, for more detail, the book Immunity to Change. Both books are by Robert Kegan, PhD., and Lisa Lahey, PhD. I can’t say enough about these two people, their books, and the formative impact they’ve had on me, my work and life.
Question 4 — about your worry, fear, or anxiety — is a very big deal. It is also the most difficult to see and why most people will not change. For most of us, “Just Do It” is a fine slogan but it usually doesn’t work when we are trying to change behaviors that are arising from a deep-seated internal operating system. It sells lots of shoes, yes. And it may work on occasion in terms of changing deep-seated stuff. But don’t bank on it. I’ve never seen it work.
Changing the #1 behavior that holds you back will provoke fear, worry, or anxiety and most of us don’t know how to deal with that. Changing this old behavior involves leaving our comfort zone, and we don’t know how to deal with that, either. We spend a lot of time moving away from our emotions and away from discomfort… and this requires we do just the opposite. So, most of us won’t change.
Our discomfort zone is also the zone of uncertainty. The following quotation captures the essence of this, and therefore why so many good, well-intentioned people study personal development, self-help, or whatever you want to call it… and never really change.
Most people prefer the certainty of misery over the misery of uncertainty.
— Virginia Satir
Bottom line: If you are going to change behavior, you need to know how to work with emotions.
Most people don’t know how, and that is why Sara and I spend so much time on three topics:
1. How to work with emotions.
2. How to cultivate compassion (which helps us work with emotions).
3. How to cultivate your own peer development group (which helps us summon our courage and provides support for tolerating the uncertainty and the emotions this work brings us up against).
You will be seeing a lot more from us on these topics in our upcoming podcast on iTunes and our blog and vlog posts.
Question 7 is a powerful question. Here’s why.
You can’t plow a field by turning it over in your mind.” — Irish proverb
Many people might answer the first six questions, gain some important insight… and nothing will happen. I’ve noticed that we human beings assume that insight automatically parlays into change, into action. It’s a lie. It doesn’t happen that way.
Giving you a full bridging approach is bigger than this post. But I can give you two pointers.
- Reconnect with these answers at least once per week and let them inform your plan for your week and your daily actions.
- Enroll support. Enroll a friend or loved one or two to support you. Share what you want, and report to them weekly. Hopefully, make it a two-way street. Sara and I will be writing and podcasting about how to create your own peer development group during 2019. (More to look forward to.)
My Answers
I have my own challenges, of course. I support people (and support people who support their peers) in personal development not because I have it all figured out but because I make a pretty remarkable crash test dummy. I struggle with all the same things everyone else does. I just happen to study this a lot, make a living figuring it out, and helping others do the same.
I’ll get a bit vulnerable here. I will open up my interior world and my process to you in hopes that it will help you get a feeling for how the seven questions might help you.
If this seems “deeper” than you think you can go, worry not. I have been at this for a lot of years. I go a little deeper every year, like peeling the layers of an onion. (Over making my way down through a parfait. It depends on the day.)
1. #1 Thing to Accomplish
Release great content every week. By the end of the year, consistently reach 2,000 people a week who are excited to hear from us.
2. #1 Counterproductive Behavior (what will trip me up)
Putting content creation and release last, and doing other easier and/or more pressing work, first.
(I have three other behaviors that go right behind this — saying yes to too many things, overcomplicating things, and not effectively including others in those things. But the #1 is the #1.)
3. #1 New, Productive Behavior (what will enable me to achieve this goal)
Do content creation and the release of it first… before the other things.
(What will also help me is to say “no” to more things, to keep things simple, and to better include my team mates in the things we say “yes” to. But, hopefully you see the #1 is the real number one, and these latter three things are simply ways to make the #1 new behavior much easier. Or even possible.)
4. Key Fear (involved with stopping 2 and starting 3)
My key fear is putting myself out there in this way, and being found out to be a fraud.
(Self-doubt and some deep shame come into play here, strongly. I can feel it now, as I admit this fear to you, as I write this. My amygdala is firing. I can feel tension in my back, my arms, my chest.)
(There are other fears at play, too. Like saying “no” to the very thing I should have said “yes” to. And like the fear of including others and feeling like the value of my work is diminished. But that fear I wrote above… that’s the key one. How do I know? Because I know how it feels in my body. It is gripping.)
5. My Key Justification (for continuing 2 and not doing 3)
I assume if I start and then fail to deliver, that I won’t be able to handle the negative feelings… and that I’ll quit and feel like crap, just like all the times before.
(This has been a strong aspiration — to consistently create great content and reach and connect with lots of people — for many, many years. I’ve not cracked the code, and I’m embarrassed to admit it. But it is true.)
6. Key Benefits (of accomplishing this)
There are many. Ability to connect with and serve others who might benefit from what I know. Ability to better support Sara and my colleagues Pamela and Katricia in bringing their best work forward.
But most importantly, it would heal me. There’s something deep down there, something I can’t put words to or fully understand. It gives rise to all this. And to a lot of other things. I want to face this, embrace it, and transmute it.
What happens if I don’t? Simply put, I can’t bear the thought of dying without having given it my all, to heal myself along these lines. What I hope you see in this is that it is not first and foremost about accomplishing #1 above. I’m using what I want to accomplish as an anchor point to do something more important — to map out a part of myself that needs some dire attention. Some love. Some healing.
It gets stronger when you get the feelin’
When you get it down in your soul
And it makes you feel good
And it makes you feel whole
When the spirit moves you
And it fills you through and through
Every morning and at the break of day
Did ye get healed?
— Van Morrison, Did Ye Get Healed
7. How will I “bridge” the above into my life?
Fortunately, I have three things working for me already:
- An understanding of behavioral change
- A basic planning and tracking discipline, and
- People around me who will challenge me to do this.
So, I will put the answers to the questions in my planner and review them weekly when I do my weekly review. And I will modify my “personal improvement goal” (more on this in a later post) to reflect this. And, lastly, I will ask Sara and Katricia to challenge me. That will be my bridging process to increase the likelihood that my good intentions will become reality.
So I hope that, in some way, sharing my own current focus helps you. I hope — in some way — it encourages you to dig a little deeper, to get a little more focused, to see what you want to accomplish as — first and foremost — an opportunity to gain self-knowledge, to come to know yourself better, a chance to integrate and heal something that might have been affecting you for your entire life. Something that is holding you back from the life you most want, from being the person you want to be, from showing up in the world in the biggest, best, boldest, most loving expression of yourself. And to shine.
Lot’s more coming along these lines. If you want to learn more — a lot more — about how to gain self-knowledge, how to change behavior, how to work with emotions, how to cultivate compassion, how to form peer development groups… you should be on our email list below. Because a podcast is coming soon, and Sara and I will be sharing all we know about these things and more.
That’s it.
I hope you rock your 2019.
I hope these seven questions help make your personal development work practical.
I hope my personal share helps bring this to life for you.
And I hope you join Sara and me and lots of other folks who — just like you — are determined to give it a go this year.
Again, I’d love to hear from you if you choose to turn into those seven questions. If you choose to face them. To dig deep. And to let them reveal something within you, to you.
This is personal development made practical. And I’m all about that.
P.S. Know anyone who might like or be helped by this article? If so, I’d be obliged if you’d pass it along.