Employing Differences, Episode 67: Do I have to change who I am?

Paul: 0:07

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

Karen: 0:14

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:15

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:17

Each episode, we start with the question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Do I have to change who I am?"

Paul: 0:27

We've talked a bunch on the show about feedback, about making requests of people to change behavior, about how you might receive those more gracefully or not. Things that you might do, obstacles that you might encounter to taking that in. And one of the things that I don't think we've talked about before but that comes up, occasionally, is and I've said this myself, somebody made a request of me, "Could do this other thing? Or "You keep doing this thing. Could you stop that?" And the words come out of my mouth, "Well, that's just who I am." And I think many of us have had that experience, where we've given feedback to somebody, we've asked them to do something different, and they say, "Well, that's just who I am." And so what we want to dig into a little bit today is this stumbling block to receiving feedback gracefully, to change, to growth, of the idea that in order to do something different, I have to become a different person. Because that's terrifying. And I think in a lot of cases, not necessarily true. So we wanted to dig into that.

Karen: 1:43

Yeah, and I think that even just the way you're framing it of, we get some feedback in our go to is, "That's just the way that I am." I think that's pretty reliably a defensive kind of response. And I want to be clear that defensive responses can be absolutely appropriate and fine. If someone's asking me to make up a bunch of stories and deceive people, I'm not gonna. That's not who I am. That would change something about my fundamental who I am, and I'm not going to go there. You know, even if it's in the "Could you just be nicer? Could you just not say the direct thing?" And, actually, that's not who I am. And I'm probably not going to change who I am in that way. And the distinction that I would make about that as compared to requests that probably I should pay attention to and behaviors, I probably would be better served and that my organization would be better served if I made I think the distinction is that when the behavior that I'm looking at is very much about what I value. That for me, I value honesty, I value authenticity, I really value direct dealing with people. And even if it would be easier and smoother and nicer to say the kind thing that isn't actually true, that's probably a shift away from who I am. That's probably not a thing that I'm going to change because it really is who I am. And it's not going to work for me to do that. So in that case, I'm going to give the answer to the question,"Do I have to change who I am?" No, I don't, and I'm not gonna, and what I need to do is go find the organization that doesn't ask me to. But I think what we're pointing to today, what we're more interested in looking at is when we get that, "But wait, that's just who I am," and slow down and look at it and discover that actually, the behavior that we're talking about isn't tied to a value or a core identity for me. It's tied to comfort. It may be tied to safety in some way. It may be tied to an old defense that I used to need, but I don't need now. So I think when that sort of defensive thing gets triggered in us by some feedback, just slowing down and getting really curious about,"What is it that I'm protecting? Am I protecting a core value or a core identity piece? Or am I protecting something that's more in the realm of comfort, and even in the realm of safety? And then is that safety that I actually need?"

Paul: 4:21

A lot of it for me comes to tendencies. What we tend to do. We've talked about patterns that we live in before and those patterns are comfortable and familiar and skillful. There are things that have gotten us this far. We're good at these sorts of things. And a lot of times I think that that defensive response comes from the often the unconscious idea of "But if I had to do something else, I'd be bad at it." Or at least it would be uncomfortable. iIt would be difficult to learn and difficult to get as good at. I think there's also a piece where even for things where there is a value involved, what is also going on is that whatever this behavior is our usual way of living and expressing that value. And so we might be being asked to change the way we behave but still not give up whatever that value. Like,"Look, I'm not asking you to be dishonest. What I am asking you to is not interrupt me in the middle of the conversation to tell me that you think the information is incorrect. Let me finish." So I think we can even when we're in that place of like, this is who I am, this is what I value, we actually can't see that there are multiple different behaviors we might exhibit that could still embody that value. We've got our way of doing it. And that that's really I think, what it comes to is, if we want to get a different result, it's not that we have to change who we are, but we might have to change how we do things. And teasing those things apart, can be difficult and challenging.

Karen: 6:10

I think one of the the most stuck things, at least for me, is when I've worked pretty hard to learn a new way of being for good reason. We did an episode a few episodes back about, "Can I interrupt?" and talked about how I had learned as a child to never-ever-ever interrupt, and then in this episode, we were asking ourselves, why are there times when we really would be more effective if we did interrupt. And I think that's an example where, I learned a hard lesson. My natural growing up I don't know how I got there - but I arrived in adulthood thinking that interrupting was a good idea, and then learn "Oooh, interrupting is not a good idea, never interrupt." So it's this learned rule that I've adopted through painful experience and feedback, and then get attached to that. And then darned if that's not more nuanced than I thought it was. And I'm having to go back and reopen that thing that I thought I had learned that was protecting me from the criticism that I got when I did it the other way. And I think this is iterative. I think we do this for life. And that even the things that were really hard won lessons from earlier feedback turn out to be open to possible reinterpretation in new environments, with different people, in different relationships, or just at the next level of growth at the next layer of what we get ready for in this game we call life.

Paul: 7:41

And what you're talking about there with those rules for behavior that we self imposed, I think that's one of those places that we we confuse identity and behavior. Because this is the thing that we're kind of putting out there is that identity and behavior are different things. And that you can potentially change your behavior without changing your identity. However, one of the things that mediates between those two one of the models that I really liked for this comes from Virginia Satir, where she talks about what she calls Survival Rules, which are these things that we learned early on and that are absolutely about keeping us safe and protected and managing our anxieties. And so like, "You must never interrupt," that is a survival rule. And what's interesting is she has this process that you can go through when you start to identify those of softening them, "You must never interrupt can," become, "I can sometimes interrupt." "I may choose to interrupt" and working through those can feel like you're becoming a different person. Because now you're seeing yourself doing these things that you never saw yourself do before. And so I do think that there's some there's some weird squishiness around that idea of identity and behavior and things like that. The more room we have for action is the further apart we can kind of tease those ideas. Some of those things are gonna be really tight together, where we can't see a gap between them, between sets of possible actions and who we are, and where there's more space, I think we have more choice about what we want to do.

Karen: 9:21

Yeah, and I think there's a space here for gentleness with ourselves. We aren't ready to change all our behaviors in a day, and it is a process over time, and it's a lot about how does my behavior match or not match my goals, my intentions, my desires, and also the needs of the people around us. So I think another pattern that I see is that as we learn to change certain behaviors, because we're in a new environment, because we're in a new relationship, whether at work or at home or wherever we might be, and then if anyone's ever gone with their spouse back to their spouse's home we put ourselves back in the old environment and its like, clunk. Here we are back in the old patterns, and "I've never seen you talk to anybody like that? Where's that coming from?" And I think that same thing happens with lesser degree when we're around someone who has a similar behavior pattern or who reminds us of those old environments. So being cautious of, Okay, I'm in a new environment or returning to an old environment, but as I shift environments, what's coming up for me? And how am I responding? And how am I maybe forgetting some of the learnings that I had? Or adapting to a new environment and I need to let go. Oh, I learned this new way of being in a new environment, and now I'm in an environment a lot like the old one, I maybe need to bring those behaviors back even. Which brings me to behaviors are not inherently good or bad. No particular behavior is inherently good or bad. It's all very contextual, and what's in the environment and where is it working. So I feel like you're leaning into, Paul, is the desire to be nimble, and to be able to notice what sort of behavior is effective and is going to work here and be effective for me. And if we can recognize, I can be shifting how I behave in different situations and that doesn't mean I'm not being true to who I am, then we can be effective as we move through life in different situations.

Paul: 11:34

Yeah, it's really a developmental piece. This was sort of hammered home for me a few years ago. It's funny, because this situation was followed like two weeks later with a situation where I was visiting my family and discovered where a bunch of patterns came from. So I've had exactly that a situation you're talking about. But I'd gone through this sort of diagnostic and developmental program, and I was working with some stuff I was driving back from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, on Highway 101 and it's funny, because I remember exactly where I was near a particular rest stop and I was thinking about,"Why do I always do this thing?" Part of it was getting some feedback about this is thing I always do. And I was just telling myself this whole thing about like, "Well, if I stopped doing that, then I'm not me anymore." And I had this moment of, "Oh, actually, no." Because that was the resistance piece for me. The piece was, "I don't want to stop doing that necause that's giving up who I am. It's a core part of my identity". And then I realized, actually, being effective is not about stopping doing that. It's about having another thing that I could choose to do instead, in that circumstance. And then actually, we've talked about this before having the discernment to figure out which of those is actually going to be valuable in this situation. So it's not that I'm not that person anymore, and it's not that I have to stop doing this thing. It's that I don't want to do this thing all the time. I don't want to do this thing habitually, when it's not useful, simply because it's comfortable and helps me manage my anxieties. In order to do that, I have to develop this alternative skill. I have to develop the other thing. And that process is hard, and painful and full of failure and things like that. But once I do that, then I get to choose. Then I get to actually be useful in a broader set of situations, rather than only in situations where the only skill that I have is the one that's valuable. And so that isn't about changing who I am. It's about giving myself more options for action, by developing more skills and the discernment to figure out which ones I want to be when.

Karen: 13:48

Yeah. So I think just traveling where we've been... Do I have to change who I am? In general, we're saying "no." But maybe being clear about who am I, and where is that my values, my identity? And how is that not the same as my behavior? And really distinguishing and teasing apart where they may kind of be a meshed in our own thinking of what is behavior and can become choice and what is really values, identity, things I want to hold. And that as we get a sense of what are things that our behavior, how do we give ourselves choice? How do we get to a place where we've developed an alternate skill set where we've gotten curious and interested, and where we have choice both sort of as an ongoing habit, we can change a habit ongoing, but also and maybe more importantly as we move from one context to another, one environment to another, one situation to another, that in that space, we can be nimble enough to pick which of our behaviors, which of our skills is going to be useful and effective for us in that space. And that makes us more successful in whatever our goals are.

Paul: 14:59

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

Karen: 15:06

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