Introduction and Episode Question

[00:00:00] Paul: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals. 

[00:00:08] Karen: I'm Karen Gimnig. 

[00:00:09] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:00:11] Karen: Each episode we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, is it just me? 

The Common Experience of Feeling Alone When Facing A Problem

[00:00:18] Paul: One of the experiences that I very often have when I run workshops, with a group is we do some sort of activity that is kind of surfacing what's going on, right?

[00:00:30] Paul: We want to dig into what are the problems or what are the challenges that people are running into? What are the things that are not working maybe as well as they would like, and things like that. And it's important to get those things out on the table to create a space where we can talk about them, because those are the things that we're there to address, right?

[00:00:45] Paul: We actually wanna be helpful, right? And so we need to figure out, well, where do people need help? And so inevitably when I do something like this, and I had this experience twice last week, with a client in two different workshops where one of the takeaways that someone has at the end of the workshop is I thought it was just me.

[00:01:04] Paul: I thought I was the only one who had that problem. Or I didn't realize how many other people were thinking about this as a possible solution. I didn't know there was so much appetite for potentially moving in this way, which we haven't really talked about before. And so what we wanna dig into today is this, I mean, this phenomenon of, you know, it must just be me.

[00:01:25] Paul: You know, where does it come from? How do we go for so long? Why do we need to bring in someone from the outside to run a workshop before we realize these kinds of things? What might we do differently? But also like, what's the impact of doing that? What happens when we actually start to surface these things so that we can figure out that it isn't just me?

[00:01:42] Paul: Why is that a useful thing to do? 

The Impact of Normalizing Shared Challenges

[00:01:43] Karen: Yeah, and I will say that, you know, as we know on this show that Paul works largely in the corporate space, and I work largely in community spaces. And the same exact thing happens in the workshops that I teach to, intentional communities when I go visit. And very often the most useful thing, or among the more useful things that I've talked about is this problem that you're having.

[00:02:05] Karen: I see it in lots of communities and it shows up in that same way. And what I find is that when they think it's just me, and interestingly this is true, if it's an individual in a system that thinks it's just me, the individual happens exactly the same way. If it's just us, this community. But there's a lot of, what's wrong with me?

[00:02:27] Karen: There's some shame built in there. There's, we must have done something wrong. You get a lot of judgment, you get some anxiety. There's a fear that, you know, if it's just me, then it must be part of me and it's gonna be true for me forever. No matter where I am, no matter where I go, it's just a thing.

[00:02:43] Karen: But all of that judgment and anxiety and fear and shame and all of that stuff that comes with the, it's a just me story, makes the thing harder to fix and harder to tolerate, and harder to live with, and harder to work through and harder to talk about. Like all of that is in there. And so I wanna bring in here the word normalizing.

[00:03:05] Karen: There's an incredibly valuable thing about normalizing. The lived experience of people trying to function together because in fact, it's very unusual at this stage that somebody says to me, oh, I'm having this experience in community, or I'm having this experience on my team, and I'm like, oh, I've never heard anything like that before.

[00:03:27] Karen: Yep. How weird. That doesn't happen. What happens is they come to us as expert consultants with these difficult, intractable problems, and every single time I say. It's a lot like what I've seen somebody else have. You are not alone in this. Is it just me? The answer is no. 

[00:03:45] Paul: True enough. I probably 15 years ago had a coworker say that one of my superpowers was normalizing discomfort.

Addressing Meta Anxiety

[00:03:52] Paul: Right. But actually just being able to say like what you're going through is typical. It's not a sign of dysfunction. In fact, sometimes, there's a model around group decision making that I use a lot where the discomfort is a sign, you're doing it correctly. Because if you weren't uncomfortable, you probably weren't actually engaging in it.

[00:04:11] Paul: And so being able to normalize that, is the thing that I've done for a long time. Because what I've come to realize is it addresses what I think, I've mentioned this on the show before, what I call meta anxiety. So there's the anxiety produced by whatever the problem is that we're trying to address, right?

[00:04:27] Paul: The challenge, the thing, that we're trying to overcome. But then there's the anxiety we have about the anxiety that we have, right? About the, like, it should be easier than this. Like the fact that it isn't means I must be broken, right? And so what normalizing does and being able to speak to the fact that no, this isn't a sign that you're broken.

[00:04:46] Paul: Lots of groups have this problem. It's not just you. It allows that first level, that meta anxiety to kind of go away, which actually allows us to be way smarter about addressing the actual problem, like the real challenge that we're there. 'Cause we're not also having to try to regulate our emotions about, again, the shame, the judgment, all of things that you talked about there.

[00:05:07] Paul: And so being able to have someone who's seen these kinds of things before, you know, to say not in a dismissive way. To say, oh, lots of groups have this. It's not a big deal. Right? Like to be able to say, yeah, I get it. It's tough, right? It's a hard spot to be in, to be there, and it's actually pretty typical.

[00:05:25] Paul: It's not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's not just you. That I've noticed really helps people relax and then be way better about addressing the underlying challenge. 

[00:05:35] Karen: Yeah, and I think a lot of the stuff that we talk about on the show, is also in that like we're talking about it 'cause there are a lot of people who struggle with having open, honest, deep conversations, who struggle with deep listening, who struggle with being curious or being vulnerable or being available.

[00:05:55] Karen: Having enough humility to work well on a team. All the things that we talk about on the show, we talk about them because we think there are lots of people. Who would benefit from thinking about these things and trying to improve them. And we think that because we think we live in a society that doesn't teach this stuff, it is absolutely normal to arrive in adulthood, to arrive in the workplace, to arrive in community without ever having really thought about, or really studied or really experienced effective, useful collaborative skill sets.

[00:06:27] Karen: We just don't have them. And so to say it is normal not to have them. And boy, your life would be better if you did. Like, I think it goes together and that we don't wanna say, you know, you have to be this crazy superstar that goes off the rails in this wild hippie direction or whatever. It's just that we all grew up in a society that favored hierarchy, that taught us to climb our way up the ladder and pull up our own bootstraps and be an individual. 

[00:06:58] Karen: But didn't particularly teach us to slow down and do all the things that make teamwork work. That I think that if we can just sort of normalize that, then we can all be on the journey together. It doesn't mean we're not going, it just means I'm not alone and there's nothing wrong with me.

[00:07:14] Karen: There's just some things I'd like to be better. 

Creating Safe Spaces for Open Dialogue

[00:07:16] Paul: To point back to a question that I kind of asked earlier of like, why does this stuff not come up until someone comes in and does a workshop? I'd say it's because in many organizations, in communities and all sorts of different things, we don't necessarily have structure that makes it easy for us to do those things that we're not used to.

[00:07:35] Paul: Right. Talking about problems, you know, being able to manifest a lot of these things, they're often aren't good and safe ways to do that. And so oftentimes, you know, people like you and I are coming in and we're introducing something that allows for just a little bit of that. So, for example, a common thing that I do and that I did with a client recently where, you know, we had people sort of talk individually about challenges they were having with.

[00:08:00] Paul: Like this change is coming in the organization, they're gonna need to adapt to it. And I asked them, you know, Hey, think about it's been six, eight months from now you've adapted to this successfully. Like, what are you doing differently that's actually gonna, you know, gonna lead to that?

[00:08:14] Paul: What do you need to shift? And then think about what's gonna be challenging for you about that. And then what I did was we opened up basically a peer advice circle where I invited whoever wanted to. There were 16 people in the group. I think we only had time for three or four to come in and somebody came in and said, here's a challenge.

[00:08:33] Paul: Here's the thing that I'm gonna need to work on or I'm facing right now. And so that was the person who felt brave enough, comfortable enough, whatever it was to name that, to sit in the chair and say to their peers. Help. Like, what could I do about this? Suddenly, there's an incredible willingness to be like, I've tried this here before.

[00:08:51] Paul: Here's what worked. Like this is blah, blah, blah. And so suddenly people got some really great actionable advice, things that would work in that particular context. You know, not just some expert coming from the outside thing to say what we're gonna do, but what it also meant was that everybody else in the circle who also was facing that challenge, didn't have to say, yeah, I have that problem too, but got to have the experience of going, oh, it's not just me.

[00:09:15] Paul: And they got to see that three or four times, but they required using a somewhat unusual structure for what we're used to in our day-to-day. And so I think oftentimes people are only exposed to those sorts of things when someone who knows that we've gotta create a space, we've gotta do something different in order to get those things out there, to talk about shortcomings and mistakes and failures and things like that, to create a space where enough people feel safe enough to be able to put it out there.

[00:09:46] Paul: But it does mean that whenever it can be really, really useful, if you're facing a challenge in your organization or your community or anything like that, almost certainly somebody else is too. And if you're able to give voice to it now you can. They can hear it.

[00:10:02] Paul: They can go, oh, it's not just me. And they will then often approach you about it. And so you discover it's not just you. 

[00:10:09] Karen: So I think what we're saying here is that the, is this just me, is a really common question. And in fact , we don't even ask the question. We just make the assumption it's just me.

[00:10:19] Karen: And we feel very alone. We often feel very ashamed. We don't have a lot of help or support around how to fix. The thing that we're aware of is that's a problem. And if we can find ways to surface it. Very often we're working in spaces that don't naturally have a structure where this stuff comes up. And so we need to look for those ways and it's a thing Paul and I both do as consultants coming in.

[00:10:42] Karen: It's also a thing managers can do. It's also a thing members of communities can do of setting up structures where those things can be surfaced and that it's incredibly helpful. I mean, hopefully those opportunities also give you a chance to like share ideas and you walk away with solutions. That's great.

[00:11:00] Karen: But even if that didn't happen, just the part about saying nobody's alone in this and it's not anybody's fault and it's not because they did anything wrong. It is a normal thing that happens in our society, in our company, in our community, in our way of life. Like whatever is the appropriate context. It is a normal thing that happens.

[00:11:21] Karen: And it can be both a normal thing that happens, anything that we wanna get better at, but we're gonna be better at getting better if we're not stuck with the, it's just me. So how do we help people be aware? Because we think it's never just me. We think the is it just me is never the case, and we don't know that.

[00:11:42] Karen: So how do we work in our groups and in our spaces to be. Bringing forth the opportunity to say, Nope, it's not just you. It's happening to me too. I've seen it other places. This is a normal thing. Now let's pull together our shared experience with this thing to figure out how to fix it. 

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

[00:12:01] Paul: Well, that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:12:05] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig. And this has been Employing Differences.