Living With Uncertainty – How Leaders Can Manage Emotions
Living With Uncertainty – How Leaders Can Manage Emotions
On handling emotional debris caused by mistrust, procrastination, and the Fog of Uncertainty. Part 6 of an article series about trust in the workplace, in our personal lives, and in general.
Why are managers, leaders, supervisors, and executives paid more than their subordinates?
Ask ten people, and you’ll receive eleven different answers. Adventures in Leadership Land’s take is that leaders deserve more pay when they handle greater risk, face greater uncertainty, and shoulder the emotional burdens that follow. Think of the Greek Titan Atlas, bending under the weight of a big round ball of feelings.
In our experience, people generally do their best work when:
they’re motivated by an external source of stress, like time pressure, customer requests, or competitor encroachment
there are strong feelings of internal harmony, resulting in comfort, cognitive ease, and camaraderie - the “3 Cs” we’ve been harping on1.
Leaders thus enable maximum productivity by shielding their teams from excessive outside stress, while nurturing the 3 Cs from within. In our view, leaders essentially receive hazard pay for taking the riskiest, most exposed position at the front as they lead their teams and organizations through the Fog of Uncertainty2.
Simple ≠ Easy
Wait.
How are you supposed to do your best work if you’re sitting under the Sword of Damocles? By taking responsibility for messes (even the ones that aren’t your fault) and protecting your subordinates, you’ve renounced the 3 Cs for yourself!
To make it worse, everything we’ve covered in this series about trust and mistrust is simple, but not easy. Constant vigilance of turkey problems is exhausting. Treating everyone, including yourself, as a potential traitor means living with persistent paranoia. Mistrusting the people you supervise, while simultaneously trying to foster the 3 Cs, creates cognitive dissonance. You have to imagine unpleasant situations – thereby inviting discomfort into your life – in order to conduct a pre-mortem. It’s almost like we’re advocating for everyone to live in a gray, colorless world where anxiety constantly drizzles from the sky, where every breakroom has a sign that reads “00 days since the last backstab” (we’re not).
For many people, the thorny questions of trust, mistrust, and vulnerability are simple to comprehend, but not easy to practice. If everything simple were also easy, no one would struggle to reach a weight loss goal, and no one would be tormented by financial problems. “Calories in < calories out” and “money in > money out” are simple in theory, but difficult in practice. Likewise, dealing with the emotional burdens of leadership are simple yet difficult.
What’s with the Touchy-Feely Stuff?
Some of the logically-driven/executive-type readers are wondering why we’ve pivoted from concrete, actionable steps to talking about our feelings. It’s because:
The gap between intention and execution is partially caused by emotional debris (more on that later). Emotional hang-ups can make a difficult journey even harder, thereby widening the gap between “what we should do” and “what we actually do” into a chasm.
Even those normally unburdened by fear and anxiety can be A) undermined by the emotions that whisper and influence from beyond the edge of perception, or B) overwhelmed by the emotions that howl and thrash when things spiral out of control.
Those leaders who are truly imperturbable should remember that the rest of us mere mortals are not. This touchy-feely stuff might not benefit you directly, but it will help you indirectly with managing your emotionally-driven subordinates, bosses, and hormonal teenagers.
Even if you’re an emotionless robot who thinks in zeroes and ones, we invite you to suspend your eye-rolling for one article. You don’t have to believe that addressing the touchy-feely issues will make you successful. You only have to believe that it will help you avoid failure.
One last thing before we dive in: we are not therapists, and we are not qualified to provide psychological advice. We’re sharing our experiences, our thinking, and our methodology in case it helps you.
Our “Regard → Reframe → Refocus” Framework
We use a mental exercise called the 3 Rs: regard → reframe → refocus to deal with our emotional hang-ups. And yes, we like our alliterations, abbreviations, and acronymizations - the 3 As. After many years of frequent use, the 3 Rs have become ingrained in habit – sometimes the entire process transpires in a flash.
Step 1: Regard
This is the step where we acknowledge the negative emotion if it exceeds a certain threshold. We take this step when we sense the buildup of emotional debris.
Emotional debris is the accumulation of unresolved psychological hangups, which then leads to feelings of unease, tension, and inhibition. Mistrust, for example, makes you feel inhibited. When you mistrust someone, invisible chains seem to hold you back from making commitments or expressing your inner world to that person.
Note that “emotional debris” doesn’t refer to the feelings themselves, but to the growth of a pile of those feelings. It’s the emotional equivalent of a log jam, where dead wood arriving from upstream makes the tangled mess even worse.
Do any of these sound familiar?
After arguing with your spouse at breakfast (frustration), you feel emotional debris gnawing at you throughout the day (self-righteousness → shame → dread at the looming confrontation upon your return home).
After losing a key customer (shock), then receiving a stern reprimand from your boss (humiliation), you suffer emotional debris that clings to your mind for days (fear, disappointment, mistrust of your boss).
The negative emotion death spiral: “I’m anxious” → “I’m anxious about my anxiety” → “I’m getting even more anxious at my worsening anxiety.” Another example is the death spiral of irritation → anger → incandescent rage🔥
Emotional debris affects everyone differently. It can pile up quickly or not at all, depending on the person, the time of day, and the alignment of the stars. Some people carry emotional debris from their work to their personal lives, and vice versa. Others are quarantine experts who can compartmentalize their emotional debris.
Rolling the Dice on Dismissing Emotions
Acknowledging emotional debris is simple, but it’s so much easier to dismiss emotional debris than to regard it. When we perceive that a molehill has been inflated into a mountain, our instinct is to dismiss the concern. We’ve told ourselves to
Toughen up!
Get a grip.
Pull yourself together!
We’ve told friends, family, and colleagues to
Get over it.
Suck it up, buttercup!
Grow some balls!
As if summoning testicular fortitude from someone’s nether regions can quell anxiety in the brain.
Dismissal is a risky gambit – it’s essentially a wager that the emotional log jam will disintegrate on its own. Sometimes it does, and we get to avoid the inconvenient detour of dealing with touchy-feely stuff on our journey to a brighter future. If the emotional debris doesn’t spontaneously crumble, then dismissing it will compound our problems. Imagine adding a gigantic, rotting log inscribed with “my boss doesn’t care about me” to the growing pile of anxiety, mistrust, and frustration.
It’s prudent to weigh our bets. Are the odds tipped in favor of spontaneous resolution? How high are the stakes?
Step 2: Reframe
Let’s step away from the “emotional log jam” and introduce a new analogy that might better resonate with some readers. We’re going to reframe emotional debris as a bunch of zoo animals living inside our brains.
Anxiety Wolf howls loudly at the Fog of Uncertainty. Anger Lion roars when provoked. Procrastination Monkey points out every. shiny. distraction. and screeches loudly to redirect our attention to the things we’re not supposed to be doing (Yes, procrastination is an emotional problem, not a laziness problem). It’s difficult to focus when there’s a menagerie of cacophany in one’s mentality.
If we feed these animals by dwelling on the things that trigger them, we are rewarding their behavior and making them stronger. Their calls become deafening. They become bigger, more ravenous, and harder to control. Procrastination Monkey will defecate these huge emotional turds, then proceed to throw the emo-turds at us through the bars of the cage.
On the other hand, starving these animals will enfeeble them over time. Their calls diminish in volume, becoming less intrusive. Their weakened bodies cannot overpower us. Procrastination Monkey’s throwing arm will atrophy along with its dwindling capacity to spawn its own ammunition.
This isn’t to say that negative emotions should be permanently silenced; we’re advocating to reduce the howls, roars, and screeches from distractions → data. Negative emotions are still useful if we can make them our servants, not our masters. Anxiety Wolf can sniff out misgivings for us to consider, and we can then discard the information or act upon it. Anger Lion’s grumbling can encourage us to plow through paperwork and other long-standing irritations. Even Procrastination Monkey serves a purpose: it can alert us to signs of overwork and burnout, reminding us to close our laptops for the day.
Why “Don’t Feed the Poop-Throwing Monkey” is Simple but not Easy
Step 2 (Reframe) is a classic example of easier said than done. Many people feed Anxiety Wolf and Anger Lion a steady diet of toxic news stories designed to cause anxiety and outrage. Inadequacy Pig wallows in a pit full of social media posts and squeals that our hum-drum world can never compare to everyone else’s crowning achievements. The dings, buzzes, and flashes of electronic notifications gives Procrastination Monkey an endless stream of distractions to point at. Implementing Step 2 (Reframe) is difficult because it’s like breaking an addiction. The withdrawal from feeding the loud, rambunctious animals is emotionally painful.
We’ve been down this road before, and we have some psychological defenses that can help. Sometimes a reminder that we’re feeding Anxiety Wolf, or Anger Lion, etc. is enough to stop. Here are some other reframing exercises we use for ourselves, and for the people we lead:
Sour grapes: convincing ourselves that missed opportunities (grapes) are actually undesirable (sour) helps take the edge off of disappointment. With practice, the fear of missing out (FOMO) can be converted into the joy of missing out (JOMO).
Counting our blessings: a subordinate brings us bad news. Instead of shooting the messenger, we reframe the situation by telling this person how fortunate we feel to work with someone who’s vigilant and brave enough to identify problems and bring them to our attention.
Thought-terminating clichés and mantras3: These encapsulate Steps 1 and 2 by acknowledging emotional discomfort and re-framing it.
No pain, no gain.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Today I will do what others won’t, so tomorrow I can do what others can’t.
[Insert deity here], grant me the strength to change what I can, the serenity to accept what I cannot, and the wisdom to tell the difference.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
This, too, shall pass.
Deep breaths/meditation: A 10-second controlled-breathing exercise (5-second deep inhale → 5-second steady exhale) works wonders in quieting the din. We don’t believe that meditation is a magical cure for emotional debris, but rather an exercise in focusing our attention into a laser, then pointing it at a target of our choosing.
Starving the “emotional debris” animals will slowly weaken them over time. To avoid relapsing into old habits, however, we must find a better place to refocus our energy and attention. That’s the final step in the 3 Rs.
Step 3: Refocus
It’s time to return to the 3 Cs - comfort, cognitive ease, and camaraderie.
Let’s start with the first element of the 3 Cs trifecta. We’ve made a big deal of how comfort (associated with trust) is the absence of negative feelings, while discomfort (associated with mistrust) is the presence of negative feelings. This extends to the other two elements of the 3 Cs: achieving cognitive ease and camaraderie requires the absence of mental clutter and group strife, more so than the presence of some secret sauce. Thus, we can cultivate the 3 Cs by suppressing emotional debris.
In Step 3, we (metaphorically) tend our 3 Cs garden. With enough care and enough time, the 3 Cs garden will blossom into a tranquil haven from the invasive influences of mistrust, procrastination, and fear of the unknown. Here are some mental gardening techniques that we use to create a fertile environment for the 3 Cs:
Trust and Mistrust
Embracing vulnerability: In part 2, we defined “trust” as the willingness to give someone the power to harm you, and hoping they won’t. Trusting someone necessarily means exposing vulnerabilities to the other person, who might exploit it. Thinking of vulnerability as a potentially good thing (“high risk, high reward”) helps us overcome the inhibition created by mistrust.
Conditional trust: You can love someone unconditionally, but should you trust them unconditionally? We scale our trust and mistrust in proportion to how closely their interests are aligned with ours. A large section of our 3 Cs garden is dedicated to deliberately making it easy + painless for someone to stay and cooperate (incentives) while making it difficult + painful to leave or backstab (disincentives)4.
Calibrating mistrust: Quantifying our risks allows us to only mistrust as much as we need to. For example, everyone has the potential to win the lottery or become a homicidal maniac, but lottery winners and serial killers are so rare that most of us will never meet one (let alone become one ourselves). We’ll return to this after concluding the article series on trust and begin exploring the bowels of Leadership Land.
Procrastination
We shared a minor tip in the footnote of a previous post, but we barely scratched the surface. If the taming of Procrastination Monkey piques your interest, you should go straight to the source:
The Fog of Uncertainty
Decision quality ≠ decision outcome: One of the key takeaways from Thinking in Bets is the concept of “resulting” – the mental trap of judging the quality of a decision based on its outcome:
Pursuing a venture with a 95% chance of success, yet failing anyway, was a good decision with a bad outcome. However, the decision-maker is often blamed for “poor judgment” anyway.
Crossing a busy six-lane highway blindfolded was a terrible decision with a good outcome (from the perspective of the survivor, anyway).
Training ourselves to disconnect decision quality from decision outcome makes the Fog of Uncertainty no less opaque…but the Fog feels less oppressive.
Positive outcomes: It’s helpful to remind ourselves that the Fog of Uncertainty not only contains potential dangers, there’s also hidden treasure. There’s room for discovery and pleasant surprises.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and capitalize on what follows: the penultimate section of our previous essay provided five actionable steps for not only surviving the horrors that lurk in the Fog of Uncertainty, but even benefitting from them.
What’s the catch?
Like the animals that cause emotional debris, the 3 Cs garden will shrivel if deprived of nutrients. Unlike the animals, the garden is silent and will never call for our attention. That makes Step 3 simple, but easy to forget.
Without intentionally directing our attention to the 3 Cs garden, the default choice at the end of Step 2 (Reframe) is to return to our mental menagerie and feed the emotional debris animals. It took years of practice to integrate Step 3 (Refocus) into our emotion-management processes.
Putting the 3 Rs All Together
For those of you familiar with the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, here’s how the regard → reframe → refocus framework relates to Habit 1 (“Be Proactive”):
Step 1 (Regard) is recognizing that you (or someone else) are trapped in the Circle of Concern.
↓Step 2 (Reframe) is leading yourself/another person out of the Circle of Concern.
↓Step 3 (Refocus) is planting yourself firmly in the Circle of Influence.
While we adore the 7 Habits, the book doesn’t adequately address the emotional debris that can block the transition from the Circle of Concern into the Circle of Influence. It frustrates us that our brains make it so difficult to practice even the first of the seven habits! That’s why we wrote this essay.
We won’t pretend that our scribblings will melt away emotional barriers like a flamethrower melts snowflakes. Instead, we hope that this essay will lower the difficulty from “impossible” to “really hard.” We want to infuse readers with the courage to keep marching through the Fog of Uncertainty, head held high. We’re not trying to silence the fear (after all, courage without fear is recklessness), we’re trying to make it less paralyzing.
Also, we won’t pretend like we’re masters of our own minds. We still struggle with emotional debris, and we expect to continue struggling for the rest of our lives. Being pelted by Procrastination Monkey’s emo-turds is partly why this essay took three weeks to write.
We’re always looking for new ways to become better than our past selves, so we want to hear from readers in the comment section. We shared our experience, and we want to hear yours. Comment below!
We were trained in the science, tech, engineering, and math (STEM) world. There’s a common belief in STEM that “hard skills” are superior to the touchy-feely “soft skills,” and that the former is more difficult to master. We don’t share this view. Instead, we believe that “soft skills” are hard precisely because there no right answers.
This is based on our experiences, not scientific studies. Not everyone performs at their best under low external stress + high internal harmony. We know people who seem to run on conflict, cortisol, and adrenaline, but we don’t think that lifestyle is sustainable for normies.
In an ideal world, anyway. This obviously wouldn’t apply when managers “kiss up, kick down” by taking credit for successes and blaming subordinates for failures, all the while getting paid more for it.
This one is dangerous. Thought-terminating clichés can be used to arrest negative emotion death spirals, but they can also be used to quell constructive debate. Take “it is what it is,” for instance: it should mean stoic acceptance of misfortune, but we often hear people saying “it is what it is” to justify dysfunction. Also, people might interpret the use of clichés as dismissal of their concerns – caveat emptor!
How “trust/mistrust conditional on aligned interests” might look in practice:
We love our spouses unconditionally. However, we trust them more when we make efforts to remain physically attractive, and provide them with emotional and financial stability (incentives to stay). We mistrust them less than we would an unmarried partner because it be emotionally and financially painful to divorce (disincentive against leaving).
We trust our subordinates more when we reward them with bonuses and praise when their behavior benefits the organization (incentives), and we mistrust them less when there are high switching costs in leaving for a competitor (disincentives).