Employing Differences, Episode 120: Are we ready?

Karen: 0:09

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

Paul: 0:15

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:17

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:19

Each episode we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Are we ready?"

Karen: 0:28

So hopefully this is a question we ask ourselves from time to time. And the idea here is, there are times in life where we know something's coming. A transition is coming, a task is coming, a conference is coming, possibly even a conflict of some sort is coming. There's something that's going to be required of us or that we're going to get to as a group or as an individual. And as we look ahead and think about, "Are we ready?" what are the pieces that go into that? How do we know that we've done what we can do in advance to be successful when that situation arrives?

Paul: 1:11

One of the things that I like to point to about this is something we talked about back in episode 115. For me, for getting ready, there are two components: There's a thinking component, and there's a feeling component. And I think it's useful to distinguish between cognitive readiness for something and emotional readiness for something. So oftentimes, when I'm preparing for something, or if I'm helping a group prepare for something, or helping an individual prepare for something, I want to go through both of those pieces. I want to know do you have a plan? Do you have a process? You have steps that you want to go through that are going to help give you the best chance of getting the result that you want? So a lot of the work that I do, for example, as a facilitator is working ahead of time with the group to figure out what is it you're trying to achieve? Okay, here's what I suggest that we do in order to get there. These are the steps that I recommend that we go through. And we draw up this plan for the day of what we're going to do. And that's really about that that cognitive preparation. Do we have a good process that we think is likely to help us get where we need to go? And I find that that level of preparation is often not sufficient. We might get that done and go, "Great, we're ready." And in general, what we also need to be thinking about is, "Where can that go wrong?" Not just from a process standpoint of, "Well, we didn't think about that case and so it's not covered." But from the standpoint of, "Where is that going to be emotionally difficult for us?" Where are we likely to stop being able to follow the plan, because of fear, anxiety, excitement, whatever it is that is likely to come up in us as we're trying to follow through on that. Because we might have a really great plan. But if on step two, we crumble under the weight of the fear that we have about how it's going to go, then we're not yet ready. We need to do the emotional preparation – as well as the cognitive planning – in order to really be ready for something.

Karen: 3:22

And it's so easy to skip that emotional preparation. The main way we know that we need to do it is by remembering past

failures. And this is the thing: 3:34

None of us really wants to do it. I was just having a conversation with my partner this morning about how do I get done the things that need to get done as I have this ever-growing to do list. And really, what's useful is if at start of the day, I just make a list of the things that I want to make sure I get done today. And that's so logical, and it makes such perfect sense. And you know, and I could just do that every day. This would be a very good process. Totally makes sense. It's really solid. And I've told myself that a lot of times before. And I don't most days start out sitting down and making a to do list. And so this brings up the question of,"Okay, so what is it? Why don't I do that?" And, not wanting to make this Karen's therapy session, I'm not gonna go into the depth about that. But I just sort of avoid it entirely because I don't get it done, I don't take the things off, whatever it is there is failure associated. And so I just start again with, "Okay, I need to make a to do list." But I don't actually think through those painful failures that tell me... Because I'm still the same person. And these patterns that we've had, they didn't dissolve the last time they happened. They're just sitting there waiting to resurface. And so I think there's a really good reason we skip that step, and a really good reason that we would be wise to adopt the discipline of slowing down. And it's not just grabbing the courage to force ourselves to look at the old failures. It's, I think, a more nuanced thing of pausing to take the time to ask ourselves, what's going to be tough? As I look through those steps, monitor my heart rate, or my tension in my chest, or whatever your physical cue is. As I walk through that plan, whereas the moment that I go, "Ugh!" And then get curious about, "Okay, what is that?"

Paul: 5:39

And also knowing what you can do about that. Because likely those things are things you have encountered before. This is usually the process that I go through when I'm working with a group or working with a leader around this kind of thing. "So what do you know about yourself that's gonna make this hard? What are the spots are going to be difficult? What's going to come up?" If they're particularly self-aware, they'll say things like, "So when I'm delivering the bad news to my team, I'm going to worry that they blame me for this. And so what I'm probably going to start doing is just way over-explaining, and going into storytelling and deflection and defensiveness." And I'm like,"Okay, great. You don't have to do that right now. But knowing that that's likely to happen, what would help you with that?" What are other situations where you have noticed that you start to have those reactions, that you're able to do something effective about it? Clearly, in other parts of your life, you're able to deal with that in other ways. What are things that have helped you there. Even just being able to keep those things in mind may help you in this situation. Maybe not. Maybe you go and you try it, and it doesn't work. But just articulating those contingencies that you have, like, "Oh, if I notice that I'm starting to ramble on step two here, then what I want to do is take a deep breath." Maybe you decide to disclose to your team that you're concerned about how they're feeling about this, and so ask them. So then it shifts off of you on to them. You can come up with those contingencies. That doesn't guarantee that you're actually going to be able to carry them about well, but at least give you some learning from that situation to go, "Oh, yeah, so I tried something different this time. I had something ready to go, and I noticed that that also didn't work." It means that you now have deeper things to try to get better at next time. But if you don't do any of that preparation at all, you're almost certainly going to fall back into the patterns that you always fall into.

Karen: 7:48

This is every bit as much true for groups as it is for individuals. So we've been talking about the simpler case, which is individuals. But as we work as groups, we also have patterns of conflict that show up. What do we do when we're in a stressful time? What do we do when we need to spend a bunch of money? What do we do when we're bringing in a new team member? What do we do when... And typically, if you look back over some period of time with a group, you begin to see patterns develop of what goes wrong. And typically, if I'm working with a group, I don't have the whole group in front of me all the time. Particularly not if we're doing this kind of work, where we're prepping. I'm working with a subset, and I'll get, "Well, so and so is going to talk too much, and so and so is going to shut down." Maybe not by name, but we're going to get that dynamic. Okay, so we know this is what happens. Let's think about a different facilitation method. Let's think about a different way to go about it. If we go into it the same way, we're going to get the same outcome. And so how can we look at that differently? And some of it's about what do we really want on the other side? Keep that goal in mind. What is it that we're aiming for? But just looking at what's gone wrong before. Doing the same thing and crossing our fingers that it'll just be different this time is probably not our ideal strategy.

Paul: 9:21

Yeah. In general, I find that when we're preparing to try to do something different – because this is the idea. We're getting ready because this is in the context of some sort of planned change. There's a whole other thing about, "Are we ready for whatever random, unexpected thing the world throws at us?" That's not what we're talking about here. Here we're talking about something that we know is coming. We're trying to have some degree of readiness for it. That's often about trying to do something different. To do it in a different way, or to do something that's going to be difficult, or there's going to be some conflict or some struggle there. It's an edge for us in a lot of ways. And so we need to be aware that if we just operate the way we always operate, we can pretty much predict the result we're gonna get. And if that prediction is not what we want – if we actually want something different – we need to do something different. But we need both pieces. We need the process piece, we need the plan. That is actually operating in some different way. We're actually trying to resolve this conflict in a different way, or we're trying to make this budgetary decision using a different method. But we also need to be aware of the patterns that are going to pull us back into our old ways. And be ready for those and have some degree of preparation for and cognizance of the fact that it's going to come up and the fact that it's going to pull us back. And not pretend that the new process is just going to fix everything. That we aren't going to continue to have the same patterns and relationships and behaviors between us. Because that is actually a thing that helps us to make the shift. Being conscious and coming to mind and saying, "How do we actually want to show up? How do we want to function differently?" Not just what's the thing we want to do from a process standpoint, but emotionally how do we want to relate to each other and to the process differently?

Karen: 11:21

I think what we're saying here is that there are lots of times in the life of an individual or the life of a group that we see a thing coming. And we know we're going to have a task to do or a circumstance to respond to our decision to make. And we – to some degree or other – but hopefully we're reasonably good at looking at, "Okay, so what are the steps?" We lay out the logistics. We have a step-by-step plan. We have some kind of process laid out. This is how we're going to do this thing. And what we're saying here is that it's really important to ask ourselves,"Okay, we're ready with a plan with the logistics. Are we ready emotionally? Are we ready with the things that get in our way?" And some of that is the courage to look at it from a really honest perspective of, "Okay, when have I tried to do something that looked a lot like this before and it didn't go so well?" Or where are the things that kind of make my heart stop what I think about them or have some other emotional reactions and nerves coming up? And really consider how can we provision ourselves to do those differently this time? So rather than sort of the crossing their fingers and hoping approach have a strategy for how can I engage emotionally in a different way? I may even go back and shift the process and change those steps in some way. Or I may work with someone to shift things around or get some teamwork involved. It may go a lot of different ways. But to really get to a place where I've looked at where my emotions are going to pull me off, where the emotional space is going to knock me out of my plan, and done some work to give myself a chance to do it differently and not get knocked out in that way. If we can do that, whether as an individual or as a group, the odds of reaching our goal go up significantly.

Paul: 13:15

Yeah. Well, that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 13:20

And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.