Building the capacity to decline

Hi, GGEG friends! Below is a blog I'm playing with for posting on our company website (www.cultivatingleadership.co.nz, which also feeds to my US site, www.kenningleadership.com). I'm interested in your thoughts before I post on a more public site! Thanks.

I work with a number of clients who are extremely smart, high achieving, successful by societal standards, but can’t for the life of them say “no.” These aren’t weak or indecisive people. They usually have well-honed analytical skills and are required to make difficult decisions on a daily basis. But when it comes to deciding how to spend their time, their ability to choose mysteriously melts away

I’m sure many of you have worked with this person (or maybe you are this person!). She was her high school valedictorian (or something equally high-achieving), went to Harvard (or Yale or…), got a great job, made good money, went back to attend an equally elite graduate school, got another great job, and now she’s in her early to mid 30’s. She wakes up one day and looks back at her achievements. “Yep,” she says. “I sure have done swell….look at all I’ve achieved. Then why do I feel overwhelmed (or unfulfilled or directionless or just plain unhappy)? What the hell do I care about? “ I lovingly call this client the Professional Achiever. All her life, she did the next challenging thing in front of her. Meeting and exceeding others’ expectations, real or imagined, has become her calling card. Achieving is what she is. From a developmental perspective, this person can be thought of as fused with her role as achiever, she is Achiever. Her self-perception is one with her ability to do the next hard thing. And now, she is stuck because her external circumstances increasingly demand something different or perhaps her inner desires have shifted, but she can’t seem to take different action. What to do?

My client, Joe, is one of these. When I started working with him, he claimed to have been aware of his condition for quite some time. He knows he’s unhappy. He describes himself as alternating between blindly taking on all that is asked of him by his superiors and his clients and then, once having reached a breaking point, fuming with resentment and wanting to quit. He can describe his dilemma but doesn’t seem to be able to do anything about it. With the help of the Kegan’s four column exercise, he was able to see that he was caught between, on the one hand, wanting to be more guided by a self authored set of criteria and on the other, not wanting to do anything that might call into question his identity as someone who can rise to any challenge, do what needs to be done. If he didn’t uphold the story he had about himself (and the one he believed others had about him), who would he be? What value would he bring? Who would want to work with him? Stuck.

So we turned to a body-based practice. I am playing with the notion that the body might provide the scaffolding that can help people move from a budding ability to take a larger perspective cognitively to the ability to actually take an action that is aligned with the new perspective. I asked Joe to stand across the room from me. As I walked toward him with my arm stretched in front of me, pointed at his chest-height, I said to him “Joe, I need you to take the lead on the XYZ proposal for a really important client. You’re the only one who can do it because it’s right in the area of your expertise….and it’s due on Monday.” Joe’s assignment was to decline my request both verbally and by gently but firmly moving my outstretched arm off to one side.

As I got close to Joe, he looked down and meekly said “No, I can’t do it,” gently and reluctantly moving my outstretched hand. I wasn’t convinced and gave him this assessment, and he told me this was just how it feels when he is faced with a real-life request. We tried again a few times. Although he got a little louder with each turn, every aspect of his body movement said to me that he hadn’t yet developed the capacity to decline such a request in real life. So I asked him to do the following: center, face into my request, and physically enter into the request. He was to imagine that he was joining energetically with my request and then making the choice to respectfully decline.

The result was surprising to him (but not so much to me). This time Joe faced me with greater confidence, moved slightly toward me, and gently but firmly declined my request and kept moving forward. He was shocked at how different this felt, saying that it was as though something in him came to life, a feeling that he knew where he wanted to go and that my request didn’t fit into his move toward that thing. Accustomed to usually saying “yes” or, very rarely, saying “no” out of anger and frustration (and then feeling bad about that). This felt like something different all together---like holding his dignity, but not so much having to fight for it. This physical exercise allowed Joe to begin noticing how his reluctance to decline lives in his body as well as in his head. With continued practice, he may be able to create new muscle memory that will scaffold this aspect of his transition to a more self authored voice.