Several of my clients this week are experiencing the negative symptoms that come when we don’t say what needs said.  Our bodies don’t like holding the energy of “calling b.s.” when we neglect to do so, or of stepping over something that we needed to say.  This can manifest as headaches, anxiety, irritation, stomach upset, or other physical tension.  It also results in behaviors like overwork (when we do what we’d tried to delegate or what colleagues have failed to complete), contortions (when we have to go out of our way to avoid that person we need to say something to), and problems in other relationships (when we complain to third parties or take our frustrations out on them).

The solution to all of these is simple, though it’s seldom comfortable.  We’ve got to say what needs sayin’ (That’s a line from a country song.  If it weren’t, I’d have left that last “g” in there), or the problems will continue to multiply.  I know that you probably consider yourself a straight shooter.  But I’m also betting that you do your best not to create waves when it’s not necessary, and that, like many of my clients – and myself and Sara at times – you err on the side of stepping over those wave-making topics.  Here’s how you know when you’ve done that:

-          You find yourself annoyed with someone you really care about and like

-          You start to feel resentful, put-upon, or condescending (yes – this is always a sign you’re not saying what needs said – even if what needs said is “you’re fired” or “I’m not going to continue investing in this relationship”)

-          You find yourself saying or thinking “I can’t say ____”

-          You’ve been angry or disappointed with someone for more than a week and haven’t told them what they could do to change it

If you think about it, you probably have your own signs.  What are they?   Is there a conversation you need to have in the near future?  No promises here:  it might be uncomfortable, and one conversation will likely not fix everything.  But having it is a positive step forward, and the very first step will likely start to reduce the cost of the unsaid for you.

We progress.  We regress.  We gress again.  Growing and getting better – no matter the subject – just don’t seem to happen in a forward-moving way.  As a Don Henley song says, “All the things I thought I’d figured out, I’m learning again…”  We feel like we’ve mastered something, and then we find that it’s still difficult, or we slip into old behavior patterns.  This is where a lot of my clients get frustrated:  They assume that if it’s hard it’s not worthwhile.  Or that there’s something wrong with them.  Or that progress is supposed to be linear.  Consistent.  And always satisfying.  Far from it!

What if we knew that was the way it was supposed to go?  After the bright colors of Autumn (at least here in the northern latitudes!) we progress to cooler weather and shorter days.  Though we may grumble about summer heat or winter cold, most of us aren’t actively battling the cycle itself.  So wouldn’t it be nice if the march of personal progress were as familiar and accepted a cycle?  Could we relax into it – for all its struggles – if we knew and embraced the stages that were coming?

First, we don’t know what we don’t know.  Then we become aware that we need to learn something.  We start trying on the new skill or behavior or attitude.  Then,  just as we gain a little,  the awareness of how much more is possible lands with a thud.  Humbled, we struggle to keep integrating what we’re learning.  The new stuff feels clunky.  We question its value.  We remember that – to the best of our recollection – the old way was easier.  “Didn’t it work better than this, even?” we ask.  And maybe it did, because it was familiar and we are now in learning mode.  With time and practice, though, the new way – if we stick with it – gets easier.  More fun.  More effective.  And eventually becomes “second nature” – we can’t remember ever being any other way.  Learn? I didn’t learn this!  This is just how I am!

You usually go to a spinning class on Tuesday nights, but tonight you have a headache.

You’re really swamped, so attending the cross-functional team meeting today is really a stretch.

You have a 1:1 scheduled with a member of  your team, but that’s the only time today your client can meet.

You’re late to a meeting, so you take a seat at the back of the room, rather than squeezing in at the table.

In situations like these, it’s easy to justify your absence or the lower participation level that’s so tempting when you’re under pressure.  You’re aware of the cost to you of not exercising or not getting time with your people, and you can deal with that cost.   The real cost is subtle, insidious, and you often won’t hear about it.  The real cost is that other people miss you.  They miss your contribution.  Your ideas in the meeting.  Your enthusiasm (or just your sweaty pulse there beside them) in the exercise class.  Even if you reschedule for the same afternoon, there’s a loss when you don’t keep that appointment with your employee.  These small costs, the faint trickle of lost energy, lost value, loss trust, loss connection, add up.  If you want better results in your life and work, and more satisfaction with your day-to-day experiences, count these costs.  Minimize the number of such leaks.  And circle back to reduce the cost when they must happen.

It’s nearly impossible to be aware of the impact our mere presence has on other people.  Glimpses of the degree of power we hold just through our showing up are always humbling.  You matter more than you know.

Shhh!   I’m onsite right now with a client leadership team.  They’re experimenting with new behavior:  listening.  There’s a presenter delivering an update right now…. She’s not a member of the team, but has presented to them before.  She keeps pausing in astonishment, because they’re not interrupting her.  It’s so different than what she’s used to, it’s almost disorienting.  The group has chosen to front-load updates and hold their questions for the end, to improve efficiency.  They’re doing great with the new behavior, though their level of joking about it betrays the effort it’s demanding. 

Now, we’ve stepped into questions and discussion.  The leader of the team just noticed that other people’s comments are answering his questions.  This is what happens when we don’t jump in the instant a question pops to mind (but we DO capture it):  the conversation takes care of our concerns, or our questions evolve.  So waiting, listening, and making sure there’s time for questions and discussion all contribute to better conversations and better decisions.  Takes some restraint, but is entirely worthwhile.

We have had quite a month around here!  Sara and I have both been so busy serving clients that we haven’t had our usual times to connect with each other, to step back and look at the business, and to move new initiatives forward.  Frankly, it’s begun to make us a little cranky!  It’s so interesting to me that the higher on the balance-and-consciousness scale we move, the more sensitive our systems are.  Often, clients at large corporations who are obviously (to us) depleted and flirting with burnout will deny they’re anything but ‘a little busy.’  But we, who have designed our work weeks to include Nia class for Sara, yoga for Michele, massages, acupuncture, pedicures, and healthy lunches, notice right away when our schedules get tight or our “white space,” as we call that crucial time when the best ideas come, gets crowded out.  It turns out, the more you raise your standards, the more aware you are when they’re trampled.  So we’re doing better than ever at taking care of ourselves while we take care of business, but we’re more aware than ever of the places we fall short.

What we came up with today (over one of those healthy lunches, but after we’d reviewed the PowerPoint for tomorrow’s all-day event) was the recognition that we need to relax into the hard work we’re doing.  Yes, we’re busy. Yes, it requires effort. But if we’ve learned anything from yoga and Nia, it’s that full effort requires that we relax into it.  Doing as little as possible, while completely going for it, isn’t a contradiction in terms.  Instead, it’s the prerequisite to peak performance.  So here we go:  This afternoon and tomorrow, we’re fully engaged, moving fast, but relaxing into that effort.

My husband Kurt and I went to the world premiere of a documentary called Facing Ali ,  part of the Seattle International Film Festival, last Friday night.  The film was remarkable on many levels.  If you have a chance to see it (soon in New York and LA, perhaps to be rolled out in other cities by Lion’s Gate), do: it was a series of monologues by Ali’s various championship opponents.  The portraits were moving and inspiring in addition to being funny and containing some awesome athleticism.  What struck me most was the level of gratitude among Ali’s opponents.  Whether Muhammad Ali creamed a guy or vice versa, all the Ali opponents interviewed for this film talked about their deep and abiding gratitude.  By being who he was, Ali “made” boxing, and “made” anyone who fought him, regardless of the outcome.  And the wise opponent recognized that gift and received it with gratitude for the rest of his life. 

I was reminded of my mentor Thomas Leonard, father of – not so much coaching itself, but – coach training.  Through Thomas’ incredible acumen, systematic training, and eventually, personal mentorship, I was able to begin the career of my dreams when I was not quite 23 years old.  It would have taken me another decade or two, without him, to build a corporate track record that could stand up tall enough to match the surgically-targeted coaching skills he gave me in just two years.  Naturally, the ensuing decade has made me much more masterful, but Thomas gave me a priceless jump start.  When he died suddenly in 2003, a deep feeling of gratitude washed over me:  deeper than any I succeeded in feeling or expressing during his lifetime.  I saw – I felt – that he had made me.

Someone made you.  Not to discredit your dedication and hard work, your smarts and your wisdom.  But like me, like George Foreman and Joe Lewis, someone laid the foundation or created the industry or even became an adversary who insisted that you shine.  Your gratitude for having been “made” will deepen both your humility and your pride.  Both appropriate.

Would it be okay if you were just average?  Well, of course it wouldn’t, in terms of results!  You’re ambitious, and in truth, being at the median means getting passed over for promotions or bonuses, it means being surpassed by competitors.  So no, none of us are aiming for average outcomes.  But here’s the surprising thing:  to create extraordinary results, you’re better off aiming for average performance, day in and day out.  Why?  The heroics we engage in simply wear us out.  If we had a speedometer on you that could measure your average rate of productivity, we’d find that your bursts of amazingness have to be averaged in with the plunking, plodding times that follow them, boiling down to overall results that don’t do justice to your potential, let alone to your well-being.

So how to take better care of both your results and your own vitality?  Have an average day every day.  Perform at a moderate, sustainable level.  Your adrenal glands will start gathering cobwebs, but your metrics will go off the charts.  Our client – let’s call him Joe – has been wowed by this lately.  He’s a sales manager who used to think that “staying ahead of the pack” was the secret of his success.  He tried every day to prove his worth and some days he did amazing things.  But he was exhausted, and it wasn’t sustainable, so he’d then have to slow down to recover and gear up for another push.  He thought it sounded crazy, but he went with us and experimented for a month with aiming for “average” productivity every day.  “I was bored at first,” he told us.  (You will be, too:  it’s not as anxiety-producing, and many of us are hooked on adrenalin.)  “But then when I saw the numbers and realized I hadn’t actually felt like I was working hard to attain these awesome results, I thought:  This might actually work!”  That was in his first ten days.  From there, it has just kept getting better.  He’s got more energy at the end of the day.  He’s been having new ideas for his team and a longer vision of where he wants to go.  All the ways he’d been wanting to “pull up” out of the everyday firefighting are now happening naturally.  So much for average.

You’re the boss?  That means you’re the host of any meeting where you’re present.  Why?  Because your senior position endows you with a gravity that nothing else can completely overcome.  Of course, it’s likely that someone else will often be running the meeting, driving the agenda, or presenting information.  But when it comes to the tone?  That’s all you, baby.

One of our clients did this beautifully last week when we observed his meeting.  We’ve been working on that tone with him for a while, and we had nothing but kudos to offer on his leadership.  What could you learn from what he did?  He was there early.  He greeted each person as they entered.  How could he do that?  He wasn’t on his computer… didn’t even have it with him!  He started the meeting with some good people-level signposting.  He welcomed people back from vacation and named where the missing team members were.  It didn’t take long, and then he got into the agenda. 

If these points sound like no-brainers to you, good.  But for many of our clients, goal-driven as they are, setting a warm, productive tone for a meeting seems like a luxury… or simply escapes their attention.  And even if you’re good at it, we’ll bet that the higher the pressure, the less likely you are to attend to the tone of the meeting.  Trouble is, those high-pressure times are the moments the tone is most important.

“She just pushed me against the wall and it really #$!@ed me off.  I’m honestly wondering:  do I have to take this?  I get calls all the time [from headhunters].  There are lots of other companies where I could pursue my vision without all this bull#$%@!” 

I held the phone away from my ear.  She was really fired up, my client was.  We’ll call her Etta.  Whew!  Not that I’ve never been there.  At home and at work… so many times, we want to throw in the towel as our response to a difficult situation.  We’re mentally “packing our bags” – and here’s where YOU might start screaming expletives at me – because that’s more comfortable less messy than looking at the situation and actually handling it.  The Escape Fantasy, as Michele and I call it, is a way to get away from the excruciating discomfort of our situation.  And while there’s some relief there (who are we to stop you from indulging in a fantasy now and then!?), it’s not the path to success for you, and you know it.

So in that conversation, we took “quit” off the list of solutions.  “Just for now, simply because you’ll be more resourceful if you’re not distracted by that option,” I told Etta.  And for you – next time you’re pondering who’ll get the house in the divorce or who you’ll invite to your “I quit” cocktail hour – take that off the table while you address the situation.  Once you’ve got a grounded solution in your pocket you can ask yourself, “NOW, do I really want to leave?”

From the introduction to Peter Senge’s new book, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World:

“One thing we have learned from working on organizational and systemic change is that the leaders are hard to identify in advance.  Sometimes they are CEOs or presidents, but often they do not occupy positions of obvious power in a corporate hierarchy.  They are not the flag wavers, campaigning vocally for change, but rather passionate individuals working to transform their organizations from the bottom up.  They are most often open-minded pragmatists, people who care deeply about the future but who are suspicious of quick fixes, emotional nostrums, and superficial answers to complex problems.  They have a hard-earned sense of how their organizations work, tempered by humility concerning what any one person can do alone.  They often do not think of themselves as leaders, but time proves them wrong.  This is the sort of person for whom we have written this book.”

I quote this passage because I am heartened that Sara and I share an audience with Senge et al.  You open-minded pragmatists, agents of the necessary revolution, conscious conveyors of emergent understandings within your organizations, your families, and your communities:  you are our heroes, and it is to you that our work is dedicated.  In the coming weeks, I’ll be distilling some of my favorite ideas from “The Necessary Revolution” (and probably beseeching you to read it yourself) and elaborating on the spots where its authors’ points overlap with what Working with Power does with clients every day.  For now, know that if you do not think of yourself as a leader, time will prove you wrong.”