You Don’t Have to Have it all Figured Out

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May 17, 2013

May 17, 2013

This week we conducted an overview of the Power of TED* essential frameworks for an executive leadership team.  When we got to the overview of Dynamic Tension as a framework for creating outcomes, we talked about what we call the 3-step dance as a way to create the outcomes we want.  The 3-steps are:

  1.  Focus on your envisioned Outcome;
  2.  Tell the truth about your current reality, both what supports and inhibits the outcome, and;
  3. Commit to taking Baby Steps to create the Outcome.

When planning, there is one huge difference between the 3-step dance compared to traditional planning efforts.   Normally when planning, there is a belief that you have to have all the steps figured out from beginning to end to create the Outcome you want.  In the 3-step dance we can take one Baby Step, learn, adjust, and take another Baby Step forward.  We don’t have to have it all figured out!  We just start with one step.

After each Baby Step we learn and fine-tune, based upon the results the step produces.  A Baby Step is any action that is immediate, short term and yours to do.   In other words, take full responsibility for what you can do, given the truth of the current situation.

We also pointed out that as we take a Baby Step, one of three results will occur:

  1. Forward Progress – The step taken produces positive results and helps build momentum toward the envisioned Outcome.
  2. A Step Back – The step does not produce the hoped-for results and may even be a mistake, in which case we assess what occurred and how it might inform the next step to take.
  3. A Breakthrough or Quantum Leap – The step produces unanticipated and extremely positive forward progress – even a leap – that would not have occurred had the step not been taken.

When the 3-step dance was shared with the executive team, there was an audible sigh of relief and smiles of affirmation.

When asked why the idea was so impactful, a participant said; “This is so empowering because I realize that I don’t have to have it all figured out before I start taking action.  I just take the next Baby Step that is in front of me.”

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Identify Your Reactive Triggers and Strategies

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May 10, 2013

May 10, 2013

In our TED* work we contend that the Victim (or Problem) Orientation is our default mindset as human beings.  This way of moving through our life experience has us primary focused on the problems we face in our life – and in the world.  These problems engage an inner state of anxiety or fear which causes us to react to whatever is going on.

One practice we have found helpful for ourselves and our clients is to identify our Reactive Triggers and the Reactive Strategies we employ – often unconsciously.

Think about the situations in which you find yourself in the Problem Orientation. What are the triggers or hooks that typically set you into the problem-based focus, regardless of the situation? Reactive Triggers may be part of the environment or physical space, such as a stuffy room or noisy background. They may be part of the situation, such as time constraints or difficult tasks. Or the triggers may derive from another person, such as aggressive attitudes or a boss with outlandish expectations.

Each of us has strategies for responding to these Reactive Triggers. These are personal and purposeful, at times varying from one situation to the next.  Some examples of Reactive Strategies can range from switching to a more aggressive approach to going silent and withdrawing from others.  A Reactive Strategy can also be a change in pace.   Some people will speed up their efforts when faced with a Reactive Trigger; others will stall and/or procrastinate.

Take a few minutes to list as many Reactive Triggers as you can.  What kinds of people, circumstances or situations cause you to “go reactive?”  Then go back through the list and briefly describe how you react when triggered – what is your strategy?

And then there is one more step.  As you look at each strategy, identify which of the Dreaded Drama Triangle™ (DDT) roles are most closely associated with your reactive strategy.  For instance, “going silent” probably means you are in the Victim role.  Becoming aggressive or blaming is likely a Persecutor reaction.  Trying to fix or take care of someone you see as a Victim puts you in the Rescuer role.

Once you identify the DDT role, you are then in a better position to consciously shift to the “antidote” role in TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic)™.  Asking yourself “how do I choose to respond?” moves you from Victim to Creator.  Putting your focus and intention on learning helps shift you from Persecutor to Challenger.  By asking questions to help another determine what actions they can take allows you to support them as a Coach rather than a Rescuer.

Just by becoming aware of your reactive triggers and strategies – and the roles they spawn – can help you prepare for more resourceful responses when you find yourself “going reactive.”

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Letting Go of Perfectionism

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May 3, 2013

May 3, 2013

Perfectionism can be an asset as we strive for continuous improvement.  When perfectionism drives our entire way of relating to what we want to create, we may become a victim to our strong need to be perfect.

If the need to be perfect feels more like a compulsive and chronic need to hide any flaws, then perfectionism has become more of a safeguard from getting hurt than a motivator to self-improvement.  Perfectionists would rather focus on how they look to others than on a genuine desire to grow and develop.  When this occurs, the internal Dreaded Drama Triangle (DDT)™ is activated and we become a victim to our own beliefs about ourselves.

The dance of the internal DDT might go something like this:  “I am a victim to what others think.  Therefore I will strive to look good almost at all costs.  Praise I receive from others by doing a great job will rescue me from feeling ‘not enough.’  Always striving and performing, eventually I persecute myself for not achieving enough or getting enough external accolades.”

Being a perfectionist is a common trait for many people, especially in the Western culture because we are driven to achieve and receive praise from others. On one hand perfectionism pushes us to excel, but the downside to perfectionism is fear that we won’t succeed or be “enough.”

We have struggled with our own perfectionism and need to “look good.”   We asked ourselves, “What do we really want?” in order to shift from a Victim to Creator Orientation.  Our answer is:  “We choose to continuously grow and learn, rather than focus on what others think.”

With continuous learning as our desired outcome, we developed a mantra to help us let go of the perfectionist drama.  We call it GEFN—Good Enough For Now.  We often title a first draft of an article or presentation and call it our “GEFN” draft.  Saying it is “good enough for now” gives us room to breathe and reduces our anxiety of failure.  We have found this step actually increases our creativity and learning.

Moving beyond the drama of perfectionism is not an easy road.   However, it is well worth the effort to stop the personal victimization that perfectionism creates and move into a more empowering relationship with yourself.  To learn more, we highly recommend Dr. Brene Brown’s book The Gifts of Imperfection.

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Subscribe to our Friday Essay

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April 29, 2013

April 29, 2013

TED* Works!™ is a short free weekly newsletter delivered via email. The newsletter features insights for putting the principles of TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic) into daily practice, both personally and professionally. By realizing we can be “at choice,” we can change our response to life experiences and reconnect with our ability to create positive results in our lives. Subscribe

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Seeing the Other as a Creator

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April 26, 2013

April 26, 2013

The central role of TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic)™ is that of a Creator. There are two primary aspects of being a Creator.  One is, owning your power to choosing your response to life’s challenges regardless of the circumstances.  Second, creating what you want.

Cultivating these qualities in ourselves is always a growth experience.  Seeing these qualities in everyone else is an even steeper climb in some cases. What if someone you encounter is playing one of the roles of Victim, Persecutor or Rescuer, which make up the Dreaded Drama Triangle (DDT)™?

How do you continue to see others as Creators even when they are not acting as one?

We can learn from situations like that to see ourselves as a Creator and to see others as the Creators they are.

If they don’t see themselves as a Creator, it may not be possible or appropriate for you to explicitly call attention to their capacity to be a Creator.  As a Creator yourself, you can choose your response to them, in that moment, as one Creator interacting with another.

Even if they act as a Victim, they are a Creator. Even if they act as a Rescuer, they are a Creator.  Even if they act as a Persecutor, they are a Creator.  The more you make this a conscious practice, the more you will find that they respond to you in kind – eventually!

We challenge you to an exercise.  In the next week pick a day on your calendar and declare it “A Creator Day.”
For 24 hours, every time you see and/or interact with another person, greet them as a Creator in your own mind.  If you are sitting in a meeting, look around the room and silently acknowledge each person with “Creator” before their name (i.e. Creator Bob; Creator Jill).

Do this for everyone, including the most difficult person in the room.  Notice how it feels and what difference, if any, it makes in the way you interact with others. You can practice this with everyone in your life, regardless of whether or not you verbally engage with them.

Whether at work or at home or in our everyday interactions, seeing and relating to others as the Creators that they are, contributes to building resourceful and empowered relationships in all aspects of our lives.

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Our Natural Negativity Bias Keeps Drama Alive

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April 19, 2013

April 19, 2013

Negativity bias is a fancy term to explain the fact that we humans pay more attention to negative feelings or information than positive ones.  In the TED* work we are often reminded that our human default way of being is to respond to problems, which will keep the drama alive if we are not aware of this powerful negativity bias.

It makes sense that we humans think in negative terms.  This trait has developed over time to protect us and our brains have been trained to look for threats or disruptive patterns to alert us to danger.  Psychologists have definitive research that proves this trait.

One famous study asked people to view pictures that typically arouse positive feelings, negative feelings, and neutral feelings.  Participant’s electrical brain activity was recorded while viewing the pictures and their brain’s activity was stronger when negative pictures were viewed.

Healthy skepticism and planning ahead is different than a bias for negativity that can overcome our creativity if we are not aware of its power.  If we are unconsciously scanning the horizon for negativity, we will go through our day on-guard for the drama and dance around the Drama Triangle, playing the roles of victim, persecutor and rescuer.

The tendency of negative thoughts and feelings to be stronger than good ones impacts almost every aspect of life. Here are a few more examples of how research has demonstrated the negativity bias:

  • People are more upset about losing money than they are pleased about gaining money.
  • Workers rated their day as good if there was even a slight step forward on a project.  However, an equally minor setback was twice as intense as the positive experience in its impact.
  • Couples must engage in five times as many positive experiences to overcome one negative experience.
  • It takes 12 seconds longer to store a positive event in the brain than a negative event. Researchers also found that recall of the unpleasant memory was faster than recall of the positive memory.

When we accept our negativity bias as a natural human trait, we can stop judging or fighting our negative thoughts.  Once we do that, the drama begins to decrease and we can take the time to be fully present, and simply become more curious about the situation as it really is.

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The Gift of Forgiveness

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April 12, 2013

April 12, 2013

Forgiving need not be outwardly focused. We may also need to give ourselves this precious gift. Let’s face it, there are times when we are our own worst Persecutors!

I had the opportunity to experience this first-hand a while back. After 2 days of wonderful TED* workshops, I was at the airport working on my laptop and actually looking forward to the long flight home and the time to answer emails. I looked at my watch, decided that I had plenty of time to get something to drink, put my laptop down on a small table next to my chair, got up….. and promptly tripped on the power cord and pulled the laptop off the table onto the hard floor.

Long story short–that was the end of my hard drive!

There was no one to blame but myself. I replayed the scene of the “crime” and my clumsiness over and over again. Lying awake in the middle of the night I replayed trying to resuscitate the hard drive and then leaving the laptop at the repair shop where I learned that the sound I heard from the bowels of my computer was what the technician called “the click of death.” I was both Victim and Persecutor and I wanted someone, somewhere to be my Rescuer.

I then I remembered this quote from The Power of TED*: “forgiveness is giving up all hope of having a better past.”

As many times as I replayed the scene there was never going to be a different ending. The deed had been done. So, slowly and over a few days, I came to forgive myself and to learn from the experience. I limped through a week with an old desktop, doing my best to stay in communication. Over time, I came to cultivate some gratitude for the desktop and webmail, and most important, for the web-based back-up service that allowed me to eventually recover everything except for a few days of email. I also learned the value of practicing “presence” any time I am using this now-revived laptop.

Forgiving ourselves and offering the gift of forgiveness to other people, conditions or life circumstances, is a supreme act of generosity and cultivates the Creator role in all of us.

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Mr. Bunny to the Rescue!

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April 5, 2013

April 5, 2013

By Andrea Scott, TED* Practitioner (learn more about Andrea at: Infinite Possibilities Coaching)

We are trained from an early age to deny our feelings. You may have heard similar phrases when you were young, “Stop crying. It will make you sick” or “Big boys don’t cry.” As we get older, it is no surprise that feeling our emotions is a painful experience.

Karla McLarn uses an example of a baby crying in her book, The Language of Emotions. Instead of letting the baby know it is okay to cry, Mr. Bunny becomes the Rescuer to the parent’s unease. McLarn writes:

“We get Mr. Bunny and make him do a dance. ‘Look at Mr. Bunny! Mr. Bunny hops on his head! Mr. Bunny’s funny!’ When the baby finally begins to laugh, we feel much better. Whatever was bothering the baby, well, that’s forgotten now, thank goodness! We have peace and that’s what matters, right? What if we could say to the baby, ‘You feel really sad. Things are hard right now.’ Usually the baby will stop crying much faster if we just let her feel, if we just support her in the way that she feels at the moment.”

If we are not experienced at feeling a full range of emotions, we look for a Rescuer to numb the pain. Most of us turn to some form of coping habit to avoid looking at what may be the root of the issue. What is your Rescuer?

Is it Starbucks coffee? Shopping? Playing a video game, pouring a drink, or plopping down in front of the TV? What triggers your numbing behavior?

What is your Mr. Bunny?

In the Victim Orientation, we call this reacting rather than choosing our response to the circumstances. The Persecutor is the anxiety, or the uncomfortable emotions. Your Mr. Bunny temporarily rescues you, but the emotions are pushed down even further only to explode when we are overwhelmed. Mr. Bunny helps us survive and offers a sense of relief.

However, Mr. Bunny does not resolve the issue – it just takes us out of commission for a while – and the inability to fully feel a range of emotions may still be unavailable to you. It is as if we are pacifying an upset baby, rather than allowing ourselves to learn and grow.

As a Creator, it is important to tell the truth about our current reality – including the emotions we feel. Rather than reaching for our Mr. Bunny, seek support from someone who is willing and able to act as a Coach and help you process the feelings instead.
purple stuffed bunny toy

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Going to the Balcony

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March 29, 2013

March 29, 2013

What do you do when you are triggered by a person or an event and you “go reactive?”

The situation could be a difficult discussion with someone at work; an argument with a spouse, significant other or child; an unexpected traffic jam.  Life is full of opportunities to be triggered into reactivity and, hence, the Victim Orientation.

Typically the reaction is to fall into the Dreaded Drama Triangle (DDT)™ and assume one or more of the roles of Victim, Persecutor or Rescuer.

It happens to all of us.  In fact, the two of us have had a couple of incidents in the past few weeks that were Challengers to our commitment to live and work as sustainably as possible from a Creator Orientation.

So what to do when triggered?

Photo courtesy of col&tasha (Creative Commons)

Photo courtesy of col&tasha (Creative Commons)

The key is to “go to the balcony,” as Harvard’s William Ury refers to it.  In his 2010 TED Talk, he describes the balcony as “a metaphor for a place of perspective where we can keep our eyes on the prize.”

In terms of TED* (The Empowerment Dynamic)™, the “prize” is making the shift to the Creator Orientation and the TED* roles of Creator, Challenger and Coach.

From that balcony, we are able to step back (or up) from our reactivity and ask whatever the essential question is that will enable us to make the shift happen.  When we can “observe” ourselves having the reactivity it allows us to be less attached to our drama-filled behaviors.

If we observe ourselves in the Victim role, we ask “what do I want in this situation?” in order to shift into the Creator frame of reference.  If our tendency, when triggered, is to become the Persecutor, we ask “what is my intention and what is there to be learned?” which shifts us into the role of Challenger.  If our reactive response is to “fix” the person or situation as a Rescuer, we pause and discern “what questions can I ask and how can I be of support in ways that leave the other as capable and responsible for responding to the situation?” This shifts us into the role of Coach.

Going up to the balcony allows us to observe with a little less reactive emotion (drama) and call “time out!”    By doing so, we can rise above the situation by viewing it from a larger perspective and increase our capacity to choose more resourceful and empowered TED* roles and responses.

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Being Right Can Persecute Others

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March 22, 2013

March 22, 2013

The role of the Persecutor in the Karpman Drama Triangle (Dreaded Drama Triangle™—DDT) puts others down by attempting to be “one up” in every conversation.  Clinging to the need to be right is one of the fastest ways to persecute others.

Because of the strong drive to succeed in our society, especially at work, we may fool ourselves that winning every point will help us get ahead.  When over-used however, the need to be right puts us in a winner-take-all position.  Everyday dialogue becomes muddled with conflict and high drama when the need to be right is the measuring stick.

In our own marriage, we recognize our need to be right more often than we like to admit, which sends us quickly into the DDT.  We have discovered it is a subtle thread that can run through many conversations.

And here is where the Drama Triangle becomes complex.  Rescuers who jump in to save the day, thinking they are helping the situation, also can become attached to being right.  When a Rescuer is “righteous” about their way of helping, others will see them as a Persecutor and the dance around the toxic roles of the Drama Triangle becomes even more entangled!
Is your need to be right causing you suffering?  Is your need to be right triggering defensiveness in others?  Here are a few tips to move beyond the need to be right:

  • Begin by observing yourself talking and ask yourself, “Why did I just say what I said? Is the need to be right underneath my statement?”
  • Ask yourself, “What is at risk if I am not right?”
  • Spend more time with people you find interesting and practice listening to their life experiences.  Avoid practicing with people you judged to be bullheaded or someone you want to fix.

This may trigger your defense mechanism and pull you back into “right vs. wrong” thinking.

Collaboration, mutual support and working together as Creators, Challengers and Coaches to accomplish the impossible are essential in today’s culture.  The individualistic “I am the heroic leader who knows best” perspective actually diminishes our ability to solve critical problems facing our world.

As Co-Creators we need to tap the best, most resourceful and empowered thinking of all.  As the late Stephen R. Covey observed in reaching win-win outcomes, it is not “your way or my way, but a better way” we seek.

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