Coronavirus and the Myth of Control
Photo by Peter Hansen on Unsplash, not an actual infected cruise ship
“It’s apocalyptic!” exclaimed one of my clients at the start of our session this week. The stock market had crashed, Costco shelves are empty, school is closed, friends in Italy are under lockdown, and when you drive over the Bay Bridge, you see the docked Grand Princess cruise ship with quarantined passengers finally being released onto various air force bases around the US.
With all the chaos going on in the world around us, it’s human nature to slip into a state of anxiety, fear, and helplessness. These states of being are our saboteurs, which hold us back from our full leadership potential. Saboteurs are limiting beliefs and inner critics that harshly judge ourselves and others, keeping us paralyzed in the present and limiting forward progress. One of mine is the Controller. As described by Shirzad Charmaine’s research, this saboteur is an:
“Anxiety-based need to take charge and control situations and people’s actions to one’s own will. High anxiety and impatience when that is not possible.”
Emotionally, there is the need to take control because you fear being controlled by others or life. Through these past weeks, with coronavirus potentially becoming a pandemic, we can obsessively focus on controlling the micro-actions around us in an attempt to mitigate the uncontrollable macro-trends relentlessly blaring at us through feeds and video.
What can we do about the anxiety?
Using a mixture of leadership coaching and design processes, we can control our own mindset and energy. We control how we react to the world around us. We control what choices we make when circumstances land upon us. Within the myth of control, we can exercise this 4-step NEED process.
N—Name it
Awareness that control is a myth and recognizing that your Controller is a saboteur is the first step. Call out the fear and anxiety for an emotion that you’re experiencing, rather than who you are. Instead of saying:
I need to buy more toilet paper and 30-days worth of supplies to protect my family.
Try this alternative:
My Controller is anxious. It wants me to buy more toilet paper and 30-days worth of supplies as it thinks it will protect my family.
Naming the myth or fear allows a bit of space and some choice to appear. It allows a separation of identity between who we are, and our saboteurs.
E—Empathy
Design starts with research, and research starts with empathy and understanding for people. Empathy is curiosity and listening to different perspectives on a situation.
It immediately shifts the perspective from one of selfish preservation to a deeper understanding of the risks to a high-risk patient.
Empathy stops us from judging & shaming others:
“You’re overreacting, you don’t need to wipe down your desk.”
“Stop wearing a mask. You’re not high risk and you’re using up all the supplies that others may need.”
“You bought 3 gallons of milk? Really?”
“Eww… did you really need to give me a hug?”
Brene Brown’s research has shown”
“Shame needs three things to grow exponentially in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgement. Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot survive empathy.”
When interacting with others in this age of coronavirus, start with empathy and curiosity. Ask how they’re doing. Share how you’re feeling. Make a connection.
E — Explore
From a place of empathy & curiosity, we can start exploring what makes sense for our reaction to coronavirus in this moment. I’ve recently shared how to Use the Design Process to Get Unstuck and it involves using the divergence of ideation and brainstorm to unleash creativity. As part of exploration, you can try on different perspectives, perhaps the ones of the various people around you and play out what that perspective could mean for you. For example:
I’m taking my family out to our cabin in the woods for 2 weeks.
I’m stocking up a 30-day supply of food & other necessities for survival mode.
When I wash my hands, I’m going to make like I’ve been chopping jalapeños and am about to put my contact lenses in.
Why take the risk? I’m going to limit all non-essential social gatherings.
If these are different perspectives, how would they feel for you to adopt them in your life? What else opens up when you try them on? How else could you react to this pandemic?
Another technique that Shirzad Charmaine advocates is the concept of 3 Gifts. Using the design process of divergence & ideation, it pushes us to adopt 3 positive perspectives for every negative circumstance. It can feel forced to begin with, but like brainstorming, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. The process stimulates the brain to be creative and visualize alternate scenarios.
For example, consider the scenario: I’m really disappointed, I was going to give a keynote at SXSW and it was critical to launching my business. 3 Gifts could be:
I will move my talk online and potentially reach a broader, more international audience for this topic.
I can keep refining & iterating this talk. By the time I give it at next year’s SXSW, it will be even more powerful.
I had set aside a week of focus to travel to Austin. Instead, I’ll take that week to write the first draft of my long-awaited book.
D— Do Small Actions
Then finally after exploration, having all those ideas makes it easy to pick one or two actions that feel meaningful and can be small experiments around control. Design thinking is about divergence and then convergence. After opening up the creativity, it’s often very easy to move into problem-solving mode and do one or two small actions. Treat them as experiments. For example:
Try using hand sanitizer (and hand cream) every couple of hours for a couple of days. Does it make you feel better?
Try limiting reading the news to once a day. How does that feel?
Try planning out a Saturday of indoor time and family bonding. Was that fun, or frustrating?
Bottom-Line
The 4-steps— Name it, Empathy, Explore, and Do — make up the acronym NEED. In the coming days, when it feels like the apocalypse is here and you’re stuck alone working from home in a cramped apartment, recognize that you do have control over your choices, and think of what you NEED.
Using the Design Process to Get Unstuck
Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash
Are there areas in your life where you feel stuck? This is a deeply intrusive, vulnerable question, while coming from a place of curiosity. I embrace being curious & inquisitive, both as a coach and as a designer. More often than not, people answer with an embarrassed look / averted eyes or a pithy quip: “Is there any area of my life where I’m not stuck?”
So, where are you stuck right now? We are all humans and as an essence of our humanity can tend to have many shared commonalities. We are often stuck:
losing that last 10 pounds
between voting for a unelectable progressive and a middle-of-the-road, boring moderate
mitigating losses in my event business due to coronavirus cancellations
in my current relationship
wanting more in my job and feeling unrecognized
playing mediator between my product manager and engineering lead
longing to do more at work to be successful AND also spend time with my loved ones
Are any of these familiar? Being stuck is heavy, low, uncreative energy. We are unable to see the path forward as we are dragged down by honey and mud.
Here’s where the design process comes in!
Exploring Divergence
At its most basic form, the design process is divergence and convergence. Divergence is generating a large number of ideas. Some call it ideation or brainstorming. The specific ideas themselves don’t really matter. It’s the volume of them that matters. There is a magic in going through the process of generating more and more. Divergence is challenging the team to come up with 10 variations of the drawing, 30 different directions we could go in, or 100 new ideas for the roadmap. Most of the ideas will be messy and bad… and that’s OK. The value is in the volume—the quantity not the quality. Letting go of the pressure of “good ideas” opens up a new creativity where more ridiculous and outrageous concepts can come to life.
If we know how to do this in the work context, in generating ideas in a brainstorm, this creativity can be transferred to a life context. Rather than generating new product or business ideas, strive to generate as many new perspectives as possible on the topic where you’re stuck.
Let’s say that I feel stuck playing mediator between my product manager and engineering lead. If I’m working with someone else, my manager or a coach, I might be able to jump in a room and brainstorm solutions together. It helps to have the joint energy of a group or another person. If I’m alone, I use a technique called mind-mapping where you capture the topic in the center of the page and then free-associate what comes to mind when you think of the topic. The topics continue to branch with more free-association around the new ideas.
Mind map I sketched in 5 mins around the topic of Mediator
I spent less than 5 minutes capturing a mind-map around the topic of Mediator. I started from the top right coming with a perspective of being Stuck. Quickly starting to generate new ideas, so many things starting opening up though this process of creative divergence— gratitude for having a central seat at the table, questioning if there needs to be a villain, exploring the possibility of co-creation.
Coming to Convergence
Convergence tends to be easier for people working in tech. It draws upon the skills of problem-solving, decision-making and getting sh!t done. Once you have a giant list of explored items, we tend to want to move towards selecting some to narrow down and act upon. We can establish more formal criteria, perhaps based on our values or what we’d like to do long-term or what matters most (e.g. the relationships within the team). That’s what the product manager in me would do. Or we can simply make a list asking ourselves the question:
What do I want to say Yes to? What do I want to say No to?
We tend to be drawn towards actions. An action might include going to coffee with both people to build trust in a neutral setting. Yes, you should capture the actions that open up after the divergence. Additionally, in the example below, I call out perspectives & attitudes we can choose to say yes or no to when looking at this stuckness of playing mediator.
Simple 2 column list of items to say YES and No to
Examples from above include saying yes to the perspective of Celebrating being in the room where it happens, and no to the perspective of being Afraid to be in a central role.
Bottom-Line
Divergence & convergence is the key to getting unstuck.
Next time you feel stuck in an area of your life, apply the design process of divergence and convergence to generate many new perspectives on the topic. It’s playful. It’s fun. It’s messy. The creativity in generating possibilities from your current situation naturally drives movement/motion/dynamism which fuels our natural sense of problem-solving.
Come play with me and try it!