Think Possible: The Light and Dark Side of Never Running Out Of Ideas

introduction

It was the fifth day of working in London. I was staying in a part of the city that was crowded, loud and a concrete jungle. After joining the throngs of professionals making their way to their places of business each day, I was becoming sick of the noises, smells, sounds, and sights of the city. My poor, small town brain was having input overload. There were few trees, no grass and the river was a milky shade of brown. My inner child was yearning for a field of flowers or a pristine lakeside path. Because we had the day off, I agreed to join my colleagues for some obligatory sightseeing. We carted ourselves across town, shuttling through the Underground stations and emerged near Westminster Abbey.

We walked and gawked and gazed and took photos. We oohed over the architecture. We aahed over the history. Then we came upon a quaint little park hidden from the hustle and bustle of the city. I was being drawn to the park as if an invisible force were leading me there on a leash. There was grass, like the green stuff that grows out of the ground. It was glorious! There were trees and flowers and birds and the sound of the wind tickling the leaves.

We lay in the grass. The sun, which doesn’t seem to come out much in London, was shining brightly. I could almost feel my Vitamin D and serotonin levels surge. The grass underneath my body was soft and soothing. The hot, brilliant sun on my face was exquisite. As if things couldn’t get any better, I felt a warm, wet tongue on my face. When I opened my eyes, I was greeted by a very friendly beagle who was eagerly covering me in kisses and wagging his tail. It was in this moment that I felt beautiful, loved, vulnerable, authentic and perfect.

It was on the 10th day of working in London that I experienced another moment of authenticity, vulnerability and complete willingness to allow for love and belonging. There were about 30 of us professional coaches who were in a mastermind group together. As coaches, we are always working to grow and develop ourselves, and the work is intense. My ego doesn’t like it when my coaching colleagues tell me to lean into my edge. However, I chose to ignore that voice and do the scary thing.

As I sat looking at all my fellow coaches, I asked them to see my heart. It was an edgy ask for me, since my default is to be in my mind snuggled up cozily with my ego. By choosing to be in my heart, I was choosing a different pathway. And when I asked, I did the thing that I have been avoiding most of my life. I cried as every person in the room looked at me. I chose to stay in that moment. To allow it to happen. To do the thing I NEVER do. And when I looked up, I saw the person across from me showing me her love by looking into my tear-filled eyes and meeting my gaze. When I looked at the person next to her, he did the same thing. And on and on around the room I went, meeting each person’s gaze and soaking up their love for me. It was intense, humbling, energizing and life-changing.

These two experiences from London taught me that being truly present is so much more powerful than being stuck inside my head, which is full of to-do lists, stories and memories. My mind is the thing that tells me to do, to be in action, to keep busy, to finish one more thing. When I can drop into my body, I experience peace and calm, I can hear things that aren’t even being said, I can feel things that cannot be seen. My mind is like my sister-in-law’s schnauzer (may he rest in peace) where you could literally wind him in circles by twirling his nubby tail around your finger. When you stopped winding him, he’d have to unwind himself by spinning in the opposite direction. By dropping into my body, my mind doesn’t spin me around in circles.

I’ve been the person who believed very deeply that doing was the answer. If something needed doing, then I was your girl. I loved the feeling of crossing items off my list, of being busy, of being on the go, of feeling important and needed. I now realize this behavior prevented me from knowing myself, which was really handy since I didn’t really like who I was. It also allowed my ego to run roughshod over me, which resulted in a lot of emotional pain and misery.

All of this is to say that as I ran from who I am, a person who thinks differently from everyone else in the room, I let my ego and my mind run my life. When I stopped running and let my heart lead the way, I discovered the thing I’d been running from was actually an enormous superpower. I started to use my gift. I had impact. I changed lives. I became unstoppable.

My clients are me. They think differently. They may be compulsive doers. They may be hiding who they are. They may not feel like they belong. They may not be truly present. They may not even know what I mean when I say dropping into my body. They may be chock full of big, bold ideas ready for launch but let the ego dismiss these ideas as foolish or impossible. And I walk that journey with them, drawing out their strengths, upleveling their mission and acknowledging who they ARE in the world. They are having big impact. They are changing lives. They are unstoppable too. This book is about them, about me and about you.

CHAPTER ONE.

Your Tribe is Everything

Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames

RUMI

The term tribe is commonly used to describe a closely connected group of people who look out for each other. Our human-ness makes us yearn to belong to a tribe. For thousands of years, we have depended on our tribes for everything. It seems ironic to me that in an era when all of us can connect more easily than ever that we are more disconnected and disengaged than ever. This impacts our tribes. While it may be easier to form a tribe given the ease of communicating using technology, many of us have no tribe at all. Instead, we have loads of acquaintances, online friends and professional connections whom we interact with in an ongoing cycle of observing them, then reacting to them, more than we ever truly connect with them. But these are not the same as a tribe. Members of a tribe are committed to each person’s best interests.

Average of Five

It is said that you are the average of the five people with whom you spend the most time. If this is true, then your tribe really does matter. If I choose to spend most of my time with people who gossip, make snap judgments about others and focus on negative energy, then I will most likely gossip, judge and think negatively, whether I do it sub-consciously or not, I’ve been inhabited by my surroundings. By the way, I’ve personally run this experiment and found it to be true.

I met a therapist who explained to me the theory of the average of five on a white board, which really appealed to my engineering self who loves white boards and formulas and charts. She asked for the names of my five closest friends which she wrote on the board. She asked if each of these friends gave more to me or took more from me. If they took more, they got a negative sign. If they gave more, they got a positive sign. Then she asked how each friend would rank on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being low and 10 being high, in terms of how much they give or take. Here is an example of how this might look:

The next step was to add up the positive and negative scores and divide the total by 5.

5 + -3 + -1 + 8 + 9 = 18

18 / 5 = 3.6

If you have an average score of -10 to 0, then you are not being supported by your people. This will impact your ability to weather difficult storms, do amazing work and build your self-confidence. If your score is 0.1 to 4.0, then you have some good supports, but not enough to truly fill you up. There are still too many low scorers in your circle. If your score is 4.1 to 7.0, then your tribe has people who are high quality supports which means they can give you more than they take from you. These people contribute to keep you emotionally, mentally and spiritually in alignment with your inherent potential. If your average score is 7.1 to 10.0, then you are the poster child for how to surround yourself with people who truly empower and energize you. You have a very high-quality tribe.

The higher the score, the more your friends fill you up and the more likely it is that you can manage the ups and downs of life, continue to grow, develop an evolved consciousness and be amazing. By evaluating each friendship separately, you can easily spot where improvements can be made.

Recognizing how a tribe can support and uplift you is how you may come to outgrow some friendships while nourishing others. Your tribe is the place where you can take your mask off when everyone is watching and be yourself. They will accept you for who you are. They may even see a more remarkable and stunning you and inspire you to become that. They will stand beside you when you are scared, hold you up when you are tired, cheer you on when you are in battle and be a soft place to land when life gets tough. They are critical to your wellbeing, so it’s best to make sure they are the right people for you.

Psychological Safety

Amy Edmundson coined the term psychological safety after studying nursing teams in hospitals. Her PhD thesis was that cohesive teams would report less errors, but the data came back with the opposite result. Her study found that the more cohesive the team, the higher the number of reported errors. She went back to the data and poured over it to find how this could be. She discovered the more cohesive teams were much less fearful of reporting their mistakes, thereby resulting in a higher rate of reporting errors. Psychological safety within a team allows us to admit when we don’t know something and tell people when we’ve made a mistake. It’s when we feel safe to be vulnerable, and it makes for a really powerful team.

In 2012, Google launched Project Aristotle to define the characteristics of a highly productive team. One of the findings was that psychological safety was critical for the teams that soared. Google was kind enough to create a simplified checklist of how to create psychological safety so the rest of us mortals can do it too. Charles Duhigg, who wrote, Smarter Faster Better, provides Google’s checklist.

1. Do not interrupt teammates during conversations.

2. Demonstrate listening by summarizing what people say after they say it.

3. Admit what they don’t know.

4. Before ending a meeting, ensure that all team members have spoken at least once.

5. Encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways.

6. Call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.

I had a client who supervised a group of about a dozen people. She had a cold approach to her team, and she felt strongly that she didn’t think it was appropriate to share vulnerabilities in the workplace. When I challenged her on this assumption, she thought about it and said that if she knew about her team’s personal and professional challenges then she’d feel obligated to help them. She didn’t want to get involved, so she protected herself from caring about them by not allowing any vulnerabilities at all.

When I shared with her the results of the studies around psychological safety, she was intrigued but skeptical. We discovered that her barrier to creating psychological safety was her assumption that she would then be responsible for fixing their problems. Is that true?, I asked her. She sat back, considered the question and replied, Maybe not.

Most of us resist vulnerability in professional settings because we may think that we have to somehow fix, solve, rescue or advise someone. What if we didn’t? What if we empowered each other to solve our own problems? This opens up all sorts of possibilities, and as it turns out, vastly improves our performance as a team. So it may seem like a touchy feely concept dreamt up by social workers or bleeding heart hippies, but it actually came from a Harvard PhD candidate and has unlocked the secrets to humans working together in a more powerful way. It’s the secret to how a tribe and its members can be most effective.

What Are You Tolerating?

This is my favorite question when I have a client who is feeling unappreciated, resentful or unfulfilled. We tolerate all sorts of things, and it can be useful to check in with ourselves. What we tolerate determines how our energy levels wax and wane. When we tolerate bad behavior, our energy levels dip. When we can reduce the things that drain us of energy, then we feel lighter.

This is an important question when we consider our tribe. If we are close to a person who is a net negative on our energy levels, then we are tolerating something in our lives