Employing Differences, Episode 111: What gets in the way of being intentional?

Paul: 0:00

Welcome to Employing Differences, the conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: 0:02

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:02

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:03

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "What gets in the way of being intentional?"

Paul: 0:05

One of the things we've talked about a number of times on the show is the value of being intentional about what it is that we're actually trying to do. Being clear about the purpose that we're trying to achieve with our actions. And then making sure that our actions are actually aligned with that purpose. That there's congruence between what it is that we say we want, and how we are actually behaving. And one of the reasons why we end up talking about it on the show a

Karen: 0:18

So I think one frame we can put around this is that there are at least two sets of reasons. One might be sort of

internal things: 1:42

things that are happening within me, that I'm choosing, that I'm bringing to any given situation. And then another set of things that are sort of external or environmental things happening around me that get in the way of my being intentional. So I thought maybe we'd start with the internal stuff. And I think one of the big ones is that we don't really think through it. We don't – for whatever reason, we've got busy lives, we've got things going on – but we don't pause and say, "Okay, what is my intention?" This is a common practice with coaches and various, therapists, who will say, "So what is your intention for the next hour?" What is your intention for this meeting? What is your intention? How you want to show up, how you want to be seen, what you'd like to accomplish – pausing to think about that. Particularly thinking about it around objectives, meaning what's the thing I'd like to accomplish? And also values. What are the values that I hold? What are the things that are most important to me? I work in groups where – pretty reliably – the most important thing is the relationships they're trying to build with each other, because they're wanting to be in community. And so while they're trying to get a bunch of other work done that's about other things, if they don't pause and say, "Well, the thing I value most in this space is the relationships that I have with the other people I'm in it with," they can easily do things that harm the relationships in favor of something else that's also useful – but not actually the highest value. And in work environments, that may still be the case, because we rely heavily on relationships and our work environments. Or it may be that, for whatever reason, that's not your highest priority and your highest priority is getting this particular product launched or some other piece. But what are the values that I hold around any number of things? And pausing now and again to say, "Okay, so how do those values line up with what I'm doing? With what my intentions are minute-to-minute, day-to-day, hour-to-hour? But just getting my own internal thinking aligned with what I really want my life to be about and what I want my life to mean.

Paul: 4:03

Yeah, certainly one of the things that gets in the way of our being intentional is when we don't have a habit of doing those pauses, of bringing our intentions to mind. And so if we haven't developed that practice, we don't do it. We just don't bring our intentions and our purpose and our values to our conscious mind. Because that's what it actually requires, is being conscious of them. And as it turns out, there's actually a good neuroscience explanation for why we don't do that, which is it takes a lot of cognitive energy. What you're doing there is you're actually moving out of your automatic, your instinctual, your well-worn habits, your patterns part of your brain, which is a very low energy usage. Our brain optimize for those kinds of things that we do over and over and over again. And instead we're actually having to go into that very think-y, the cognitive, the pre-frontal cortex, part of our brain to go, "Wait, I need to think abstractly about this for a minute? What's this conceptual thing that I'm trying to do? Okay, what are the actions that would actually line up with it?" That's actually difficult cognitive work. We have to bring that into consciousness. And that actually takes a lot of energy in our brains. Our brains are going to suck up a lot of glucose when we start to do that. So it actually makes sense why we don't do that more often. It's an energy saving device that our neuroscience has put into place. But that also points to a thing we can do about it, which is that if we create a pattern or habit of doing that, then it actually becomes easier to fall into. Because now we're actually relying on that habit-following, that pattern-following structure in our brain, to get us to the point of saying, "So what is it we're trying to accomplish here? What is it that we want to have happen here?" And so understanding why our brain doesn't naturally do it actually gives us an idea of how we can get our brain to help us to do it.

Karen: 6:09

Yeah, and I think that concept of automaticity in the brain and patterns is useful in another way, which is, one of the things we bring with us into an environment that can get in the way of our intention is a lot of patterns, and a lot of habits, a lot of automatic kinds of behaviors. And here, I'm talking about the stuff of our culture, the stuff that we learned probably before we had language. This is that early childhood modeling, or maybe years of practice in the corporate world. Over our lifetime, we've developed habits that are the norms of the culture we're in. And unfortunately, a fair bit of the time for me at least, the norms of the culture that I'm in are actually not that aligned with my values. We don't even notice them, because they are automatic, because we aren't applying that glucose and energy and prefrontal cortex analysis to it. An example I think of is a lot of my groups, they're building communities, they're building houses, and they'd really liked their houses to be affordable, and they want people of various income levels to be able to move in over the long term. And they want their house values to appreciate as much as possible. Because the mainstream value is around you want your house to appreciate. That's how you build wealth. That's how you have financial security. That's just a good thing. Everybody knows that. It's good if your house appreciates. But it's actually in direct contradiction to the value of having that community be affordable or accessible to people of lower wealth. If your house appreciates, by definition, the next person has to pay more for it. And people don't see that disconnect in their thinking because it's so normal. It's so habitual to carry forward one value. If we don't do the analysis, we don't notice the other value. I catch myself at that point all day long. It's just a natural thing that we bring in certain cultural beliefs and expectations. "These are good things, it's all good." And then if you start looking at how does that actually play out, and what does it mean, and what does it cause? Maybe it doesn't align with my values so much. So that patterning of what are we arriving with that we haven't looked at – because why would we, it's just part of the air we breathe – is another place that I think we arrive with something that gets in the way of our actual intentions.

Paul: 8:47

It points to a second thing. We've been talking about how we may not be aware of what our intentions are. Of our purpose, of our value, of the thing that we're actually trying to do in this particular moment, because we haven't brought it to mind. Because we haven't explicitly discussed it or talked about it. So we may have a lack of awareness of that. But we may also have a lack of awareness of how our behaviors are interacting with that. How we actually are not moving towards that, even if we're aware of it. We say, "Hey, we want to do this thing. This is our intention." And we may not realize that our actions don't align with it. And so that's the other thing that gets in the way of our being intentional is our own lack of awareness of how our actions are not aligned with our intentions, even when we know what our intentions are.

Karen: 9:44

So if I'm thinking about external stuff that makes it harder to follow through on our intentions, the first thing that comes up for me is complexity. Because we rarely have just one goal or intention at any given moment. There's usually lots of things going on. And in communities and workplaces and the spaces where you and I tend to work, there are also lots of people. Other people who have different intentions than my intentions and different priorities than I have, and all those kinds of things. So the first thing I think that happens is even if we stop, "Okay, we're about to go into a meeting, and I've gotten clear what my intention is..." One of the first things is likely to hit me, right off the bat, is the complexity. And so it's not enough to say I want this thing. I want our home prices to be lower or something like that. You have to be willing and able to weigh that against the five other things that interrelate with that. And then in the moment, that really hard cognitive work that we're talking about is being able to say, "Okay, so I thought I knew what my intention was. And now I've got a bunch of new information and different things pulling on it. Now, what's my intention?" We don't really get to hold it constant.

Paul: 11:06

And what that really points to is, we can get knocked off balance. We can know what it is that we want to do, we can be very clear about, you know, "I want to work to maintain positive relationships with the people in this community over the course of this meeting. That's really important to me, and so these are the things that I plan on doing." And we can have a plan. And then we come in, and then this wave washes over us, of all of the complexity that we encounter. and we often can't just hold that plan. So I think part of what that points to is, we may not have a good idea of how to reestablish our balance, of how to get back to that place of when we notice that – if we do have the awareness, and we noticed that – this is our intention, and this is how we planned on acting in accordance with that intention, and we now notice that we're not actually acting in accordance with that anymore, and we're kind of noticing why – what's knocked us off – how do we get back to that place?What is it that we personally can do, to get ourselves back into a place where we can act in more alignment with not only with what our intentions are, but what the intentions – because they're multiple ones – of the group are? How can we get to that place of congruence, where we're actually not just falling back into our old patterns and our old habits, but doing what is actually useful in this situation, in this moment. I think one of the keys about being intentional is recognizing what's actually happening around us and how we're showing up and making sure that we're actually showing up in a way that is useful and that's fit for this situation. And in order to do that, we have to kind of be aware of what's happening, externally and internally, and try to bring those into alignment.

Karen: 13:03

What we're pointing to here is being able to notice it. And I think one thing we can do in our groups that will help us notice it is being willing to say it. To be willing to say,"Wow, my plan when I got here was... I really had an intention.... I was going to do this thing." And now I'm seeing that maybe that thing isn't going to work. Or that things are gonna be harder than I thought but I still think we should do it. But just sort of being able to speak out loud,"This is what's going on for me." And it does a few things. One is it helps us notice it. And it allows us to slow down and think about it by talking about it. But it also lets the people around us get the sense of, "Oh, Karen might be a little off balance right now. How do we get realigned?" Or maybe it invites them to pause, just by the demonstration of it. "Oh, well, what was going on with my intentions for this?" But having a culture where it's okay to say, "Wow, I thought we were going to do this. And now it looks like we're gonna do that. And now what?" and having that sort of moment of confusion or uncertainty or whatever be just part of what we do here.

Paul: 14:25

Which, of course, points to one of the big things that gets in the way of being intentional, which is when you don't have a culture that supports that kind of behavior. When it's not safe to say, "It seems like what we're trying to do and what it is we're actually doing are not in alignment" or"I'm picking up some some disconnect here." To be able to do what I sometimes call "rough draft thinking in public." It's not that you have to come with the plan of here's how we're going to fix the misalignment. It needs to be okay to actually point out the misalignment. And when you don't have a culture, or a process, or anything that supports that – when there's no support for that, then it's really, really hard to get back to that place when we do get knocked off. Because we're always gonna. That's really the thing. We should always expect that, regardless how good our plan is for how we're going to achieve what it is that we want to achieve, something will always come up. There are things– we've talked about this a little bit before – that we can predict probably will. And so what we want to make sure of is that we have some idea of how we can recover, of how we can get back to it. Assuming that a perfect plan will lead us to a perfect result, I think, is yet another thing that gets in the way of being intentional. When we don't have any way of getting back on track when – just due to the complexity of the situation that we're dealing with – we go astray. If we don't have any way, if it's not structurally or culturally supported to get back on track, then that absolutely gets in the way of our being intentional.

Karen: 16:13

I think we need to say one more thing about an external thing that doesn't have as much to do with meetings. Well, hopefully it doesn't. There's a good bit in our online life that is designed to pull us away from our intentions. Grabbing our eyeballs, distracting us from whatever it was we thought we wanted to do, is pretty much what the geniuses behind the internet, that this is what their goal is. And so I think giving ourselves some forgiveness for how effective they are at that. but also just being cautious about when you get on a social media platform – or for that matter, if you check your email, which you know, we kind of have to do that. But just noting how much there is in our world today that is actually specifically designed to get in the way of our doing what we intend – so that we'll do something else that profits someone more is kind of what it comes down to. There is so much just integrated into our life about that, that just being aware and thoughtful, giving ourselves some grace around it, but also trying to avoid falling into those traps when we can I just think is a huge piece. And it seems remiss not to mention that in a conversation about what gets in the way about it being intentional.

Paul: 17:46

Yeah, so to track where we've been today, we've talked about both internal and external things that get in the way of making sure that our actions are aligned with our intentions. One of those things is just a lack of awareness of what our intention, what our values, what our purpose in this particular thing is. Not bringing it to mind, not having a habit of bringing it to mind and understanding why our brains don't necessarily want to do that all the time. And then the second thing is a lack of an internal awareness of even when we know what our purpose is and we know what we're trying to accomplish, not recognizing how our actions are not actually aligned with that, and having a lack of awareness around that. So those are two things that we've talked about from an internal standpoint, from the external standpoint. One is just the complexity of of all of the wash of intentions and things – as I sometimes say "things that are well intentioned, but unskillfully done." All of the things that show up that can that can knock us off our balance that can, again, throw us back into our old patterns and our old habits that are familiar and well worn but not necessarily fit for this particular situation. And not having a culture or a structure that supports pointing out that misalignment and not having a cultural habit or a group habit of stopping and going "Wait what was it that we're trying to achieve here? How do we get back on track with that?" That complexity and the lack of support for dealing with the complexity can get in the way of our being intentional. And finally, there are just things out there that try to grab our attention. We have these obstacles that are put in front of us that we can very easily fall into those traps of spending 12 hours because someone is wrong on the internet yelling at them through the keyboard. Again because they're designed to grab our attention and pull us away from our intention. And giving ourselves a little bit of grace around that to recognize it. But also then I think the habit there of stepping back periodically and going wait, "What is it that I actually came here to do? Why did I open up my email? What is it that I want to be spending my time on?" I think the more we personally have the habit of checking in with our intentions, bringing them consciously to mind and then seeing how our actions align with it. I think that helps us to navigate even those external things that come up, that try to drag us away and that get in the way of our being intentional.

Karen: 20:27

I think that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 20:31

And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.