I’m having a forced office day today. Hurricane Helene is on the way, but still churning in the Gulf of Mexico. Here, thousands of miles away in Lake Lure, we are socked in with some of the worst flooding rains we’ve ever seen, and this storm is a tiny appetizer compared to the main course coming later tonight.
My forced office day is a choice. Could I go out if I wanted or needed to? Of course – but there could be fallout. (Like trees falling on the road or even my car.) Every choice has fallout.
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a convergence of events that made me think about our choices – and perceived lack thereof.
This week, I had the privilege of attending an event hosted by the National Speaker’s Association of Western North Carolina. My daughter Jen was one of the speakers, and her topic was Unbreakable Boundaries. I’ll start with the proud Mom moment. She told engaging stories, created audience engagement and shared a powerfully profound message about the cost of letting other people make your choices. Not directly, of course, but because of fear of rejection, the need to be liked, the perceived expectations of other and of course, our people pleasing tendencies. I sat in awe of the message she is carrying into the world.
The week before, I facilitated two different team workshops, where one of the first questions I asked was “What are your current realities?” Interestingly, choice – or perceived lack thereof - was a major theme. They used words like prioritization, high expectations, lack of clarity, complexity and growth. In this setting, having other people make your choices looks more like fear of losing their job, the need to be seen as a team player, the perceived expectations of their bosses, and of course, our people pleasing tendencies.
In other words, we’re human everywhere we go. The pressure to be perfect, to be all things to all people, to do it all is very real. It even seems admirable at first glance.
Let’s do a thought exercise together. Imagine for a minute we were going to play a new, outdoor game. The point of the game is to win. Now go! Have fun.
Wait, what? In your thought exercise, how far did you get?
Notice what was not defined in my vague new game. What are the boundaries of the playing field? Is it the size of a football field? Baseball field? Played on ice? In the water? What are the tools of the game? A bat, skates, ball, sticks, rocks? What are the rules of the game? In our path to winning, what can’t we do? Can we touch each other? Can we speak? Is it ok to break bones? What kind of game is it? Are we trying to get a high score, like basketball, or a low score, like golf? Are we supposed to be very physical, like tug of war or intellectual, like chess?
If I truly set you off to play my imaginary new game, you would have to start making a lot of choices. I can’t imagine anyone would fail to create a boundary for the edges of the game, thus making our whole planet or the whole universe the playing field. More than likely, the playing field would be defined. Then you would start making choices about what kind of game it is, and what the playing pieces and what are the rules, right? In other words, you have an infinite slate on which to make any kind of choices you would like to make.
The point here is not to make up a new game, but to step back and see that we are all operating on some sort of playing field, where we are making choices.
What becomes invisible over time are the assumptions we are making when choosing one thing over another.
The events over the last couple of weeks showed me many examples, both implicitly and explicitly. Here are some of the assumptions I gathered:
- In the case of a parent navigating their adult child’s addiction: “A good parent would not do this,” or “If I tell them to move out, they might die,” or “If I don’t pay their rent, they will be on the street.”
- In the case of a boss adding one more thing to an employee’s already full plate: “My boss would not be asking if it weren’t very important for me to do this,” or “She knows what’s on my plate, so I SHOULD be able to do this,” or “If I do this, I will show them how valuable I am and get promoted.”
- In the case of a friend who constantly keeps the other friend waiting at scheduled lunches, and otherwise fails to respect the friend’s time, “If I say something, I might lose the friendship,” or “They must be really important, which makes their friendship even more valuable to me.”
- In the case of the boss expecting his employees to always say yes “If I ask them to do something, they have to do it,” or “Someone who tells me no is being insubordinate.”
In today’s complex, pressure filled world, it feels like we are playing a game with infinite possibilities. Unfortunately, infinite choices can become overwhelming very quickly. My first time to go to the store to choose a ceiling fan, I walked in, took one look, and almost turned around and left. The salesperson tried to help me with some pointed questions. How many blades? What color? With or without a light fixture? What style? Even with the useful questions, I left with no decision, because there were simply too many combinations for me to grasp without considering what mattered to me. Once I went home and got clear on what would fit in my home, I was able to go back and make some reasonable choices. For what it’s worth, my first filter on a ceiling fan with lights is that the light bulbs are easily accessible. That rules out a LOT of other choices, and lines up with one of my core values of function over form.
It's taking the time to get clear on our values that makes it so difficult to set priorities. There are more good things to do with our time than we can possibly do; however, if we take the time to consider what matters most to us – and to our company, family, friends – we can make choices that save energy for committed actions rather than expend that energy on overwhelm.
Back in my Texas banking days, I remember getting at least one call a week from one of the other guys in my division who lived in a different town. I came to call these Larry Bitch Sessions (not his real name.) We had good reason to speak frequently for transactional business that could be done in five minutes. With Larry, the calls would stretch to an hour, during which he would fill me in on all the ways he was overworked and the unfairness of the management team. For many months, I implicitly agreed by staying on the phone and feeding his BMW (bitching, moaning and whining). After a few of these, I hung up and thought “I wonder how much more work he could have done in that time if he had just started focusing instead of complaining?” It wasn’t a huge leap to realize that I too could have gotten a lot more done in that time, and I began to find ways to shorten the calls.
Every individual client and team I’ve ever worked with has had a struggle to decide which work takes priority over other work. The idea of saying “no” to something or someone can be terrifying. But so can saying “yes” to everyone and everything.
There cannot be a truly committed yes unless no is an option.
However, as I said in my book The Delicate Art, Learn to Say No and Unleash Your Performance, there is an art to saying no.
Over the years, I’ve come to find several rubrics that help me get clarity when making choices and tradeoffs.
- Know your worth. I’ve found it’s useful to remember that what you DO for a living is not WHO you are. The marketing machine in this country and around the world is designed to hammer on your insecurities, promising that their job, product or service will finally fill that hole inside of you. The starting point for getting out of the grind is to simply stipulate that you ARE worthy (because you are) and then live into that belief. Of course, the idea may be simple, but doing so is not easy. My book Dancing the Tightrope dives in on some practices that help develop courage, diffuse fear and provide tools for operating under pressure.
- Know your values. We all operate on a set of personal values; we may not be able to articulate them, but when they are crossed, they tend to reveal themselves. Here’s a quick exercise to begin making them more tangible:
List the ten most important values you uphold in your life.When answering this question, look at your own life to see how you really live. When push comes to shove, our values come to the forefront. List those values that you truly embody, not simply those that you were taught or “think” you should have.
- Know your strategic distinction. What makes you special and unique? How about the company you work for – why do customers choose you? These questions begin to help sort out a way of thinking about the types of work you do, and about which of those types of work deserve your most focused attention and which can be done at par. In this blog, I have a short video describing the idea of strategic distinction. It’s one of the most powerful tools I’ve used to get clarity on tradeoffs.
- Prepare language ahead of time. In my book The Elegant Pivot, I have a section on Pocket Questions, which are pre-prepared scripts for situations where you might get caught. For example, what is your current default answer when a good friend or someone important asks you “Can you do me a favor?” Many, many people answer yes to this question reflexively, before they have heard the request. It’s a predictable question, so it’s well-suited for a pocket question. In my case, I practice saying “Can you tell me what it is? I would like to be able to say a true yes, and not back out when I hear what you need.”
- Believe in your right to say no. Now we have come full circle. When we know our worth, we can then believe in our right to say no. Especially to say no for the right reasons. If we are the boss asking someone else to do something, giving a choice for them to say no enhances the level of clarity and commitment they will do the task – if you are willing to have a tough conversation about what matters most and recognize that no one is doing it all anywhere, no matter what their Linked In feed says.
Three of the most difficult conversations I’ve seen teams wrestle with are the question of 1) decision rights, 2) shared goals and 3) top priorities. Because they are so difficult, they often get swept aside in favor of the work that feels more productive. However, what we don’t realize is that we haven’t swept these big questions aside. We have swept them into the path of work, seeding the breakdowns that cause personal conflicts, slow work down and generate a sense of uncertainty and confusion. It’s the embodiment of the principle go slow to go fast. Taking a few moments to consider the choices and mutually agree on how they will be made will avoid countless breakdowns.
On this rainy day with many more inches of rain to come, I made a fairly easy trade off. Stay off the roads and gratefully enjoy my warm dry house so that I can tackle a few of the important projects I’ve avoided in favor of being outdoors.
What kinds of choices do you find most difficult? How can you create time and space to consider what matters most to you? When faced with an impossible tradeoff, what pocket question might help you break the logjam?