The emotional intelligence superpower that lets you walk through walls
- Practice: Go first. Make the move you are waiting for others to make.
- Difficulty: Dead simple to ridiculously difficult, depending on context.
- Time required: 1 minute to 1 lifetime (see above)
- When to use it: When you’re at an impasse, when you’re rolling out a new program or product, when you’re starting a change management initiative.
- Why it works: Starting with your own mindset is (paradoxically) the best way to get other people to change their own behavior or see your point of view. When you’re faking it, others can tell. This is an emotional ninja move that lower others’ natural defenses — by first lowering your own.
The power of mindset
If you’re interested in the psychology of leadership and work, the Arbinger Institute’s The Outward Mindset: Seeing Beyond Ourselves is a must-read. It arms you with an emotional superpower you can use in your relationships at home and at work. Once you understand the importance of external mindset, you begin to see it everywhere.
The book’s big idea is that there are two approaches to making change happen in our organizations, our relationships or ourselves. We can either focus on a) behavior, or b) mindset.
Mindset trumps behavior.
Behaviors are more obvious — especially at work. They’re the stuff on the surface, and we’re good at managing those: “don’t do it like this, do it like that”; “follow this process”; “comply with that policy.”
But the authors argue that mindset, what lies underneath and shapes those behaviors, is actually the more powerful place to focus.
They define mindset as “the way people see and regard the world—how they see others, circumstances, challenges, opportunities, and obligations.” Mindset is the foundation, and our behaviors are really just the tip of that iceberg.
Focusing on behaviors (like optimizing a process, figuring out who’s going to do what when, “it bugs me when you do x or y”) is important and obvious because behaviors are directly conducted to results. But focusing on mindset is less obvious but ultimately more powerful, because mindset is foundational. Its the mother of behavior — it makes and shapes everything we do.
“Mindset drives and shapes all that we do — how we engage with others, how we behave in every moment and situation. So while behaviors drive results, behaviors themselves are informed and shaped by one’s mindset.”
Organizations tend to myopically focus on behaviors
This matters to those of us interested in things like teamwork and organizations, because as leaders and project managers and organization designers, it’s easy to become myopically obsessed with the behavioral model. Organizations become behavior modification machines. We just need the right system, or the right repeatable process, and everything will work out great! Managers just need to curb or coax certain behaviors out of their direct reports! (“Please do a little more of this, and a little less of that.”) We find a process that works, and then we try to copy / paste it into a new context with a new set of brains and it just. Doesn’t. Work.
This is partly why smart teams and organizations increasingly focus on things like Purpose, and taking more time and energy to align around why they’re doing the work. (Versus just what they’re going to do, or how.)
: how to break emotional logjams and make change happen
The ultimate mindset move is to go first
Ok so but, beyond all the blah blah — how might you actually do it? How might you actually apply this insight in the field, whether as a manager, teammate, parent or spouse?
One of the simplest takeaways from the book is: whenever you’re at an impasse, or struggling to get a group of people to do something or change something, there’s a surprisingly powerful ninja move available to you. And that move is: go first. Do the thing you want the other person to do. Unconditionally. Without necessarily expecting or requiring anything to happen in return.
Lower their defenses by launching the ultimate emotional surprise attack: lower yours first.
I know that may sound cheezy or ridiculous. But when you do it — honestly, with an open mind and heart — mysterious things start to happen. Ice starts to crack. The logjam bristles. You can’t guarantee or predict success, but its a powerful Jedi Mind Trick you can perform on yourself in ways that spark surprising results in the other people around you.
Breaking a 10-year relationship logjam with my dad
Here’s a personal example: I recently realized that for years that I had been waiting for dad to tell me he was proud of me. He used to tell me that all the time when I was a kid, but around about the time I got married and moved away our relationship became strained and it felt like an emotional logjam began to build. I was pissed off about a bunch of behaviors, as he was about me — but what was underneath those behaviors? I realized I was no longer really clear whether my dad actually liked me, and that he never told me he was proud of me.
And so last week, at the age of 45, I swallowed my pride and, in a moment of vulnerability, I went first. I told my dad that I was proud of him. With real honesty and candor — I wasn’t faking. I had done the work beforehand — work suggested for me by Rob Name — a coach and I realized how much my dad had overcome in his own incredibly screwed up childhood, I was genuinely proud and grateful to him. And so I told him. Unconditionally and flawed and imperfect, but with an open heart.
And he teared up. He pulled a letter out of his desk that he was written years ago. About how proud he is of my brother and me. And we hugged — like really hugged, in a way I never have of him since I was five years old — and… that was it. The ice melted. The logjam broke. We reconciled. And the resentments over various slights and behaviors (mostly) vanished.
When everybody waits, nothing happens
Everyone waits. So nothing happens.
I’m not arguing that that kind of change is easy. I’m simply noting a ridiculously simple and powerful insight from the book: which is that, when it comes to entrenched positions, both sides often end up waiting for the other. “Maybe once my feelings have been seen and heard first — maybe then I’ll take a step. But not until then!” You can wait for years and years this way. And it’s a guaranteed recipe for endless drama and wasted breathe.
This is the natural trap in organizations.
And that’s why the authors argue that the biggest obstacle to change — whether healing a relationship or driving change in an organization — is the problem of going first.
The biggest impediment to mindset change is the natural, inward-mindset inclination to wait for others to change before doing anything different oneself.
This is the natural trap in organizations. Executives want employees to change, and employees wait on their leaders. Parents want change in their children, and children wait for the same in their parents. Spouses wait on change in each other. Everyone waits. So nothing happens.
They give an example from a software company called Tubular: “Even though the issues at Tubular were not simply the problems of a single person, it was clear that no problem could be solved if individuals were not willing to address how they themselves were part of the problem. That is, until one person was willing to make the first move and turn outward without any assurance of what others would do.”
So while the goal in shifting mindsets is to get everyone turned toward each other, accomplishing this goal is possible only if people are prepared to turn their mindsets toward others with no expectation that others will change their mindsets in return.
You don’t have to be Mother Theresa
The idea of unconditionally going first can sound sacrilegious, or saintly, or Pollyannaish. Reciprocity feels like basic fairness; “I’m not going to do it if they’re not going to do it, too!”
The most important move is to make the move you are waiting for the other to make.
But if you’re a leader, or if you truly want to make some kind of positive change happen (whether at work or in your relationship), the rules are different. Making the change yourself, first, even when others don’t reciprocate — is the key to everything. It’s the ultimate emotional ninja move: setting aside your own resistance and acting how you want the other person to act.
The most important move consists of my putting down my resistance and beginning to act in the way I want the other person to act.
Would our organizations be better off if all of us were to turn outward in our work with each other? Yes. But this preferred state can be reached only if some are willing to change even when others do not—and to sustain the change whether or not others reciprocate.
Ironically, the most important move in mindset work is to make the move one is waiting for the other to make.
Stuck? Try going first.
Feel like your partner just isn’t understanding your point of view? Start by summarizing your understanding of theirs. Want something new from your boss this year? Get curious about their needs and priorities for 2019 first. Want your kid to get better at self-regulation and talking about their feelings? Share your feelings first, and see where that gets you.
Easy to say and hard to do. But those two words (“go first”) are easy to remember, and a good check-in question to ask yourself when you’re at loggerheads with someone, or feel like you’re going around in circles with people at work, or having angry fights in your head in the shower. (“Wait a second — have I made the move I’m waiting for the other to make?”)
It can become an interesting mental habit to cultivate for yourself. And an under-appreciated superpower for progressive leaders and managers. Or literally anyone who wants to be a better teammate, collaborator or fire starter.
The world is full of people waiting for others to make the first move. When you go first, you’re launching an emotional surprise attack for which there are few defenses.
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