Show Notes

Article critiqued in this episode:

When a Major Life Change Upends Your Sense of Self
By Madeline Toubiana, Trish Ruebottom, and Luciana Turchick Hakak
Harvard Business Revew – January 28th of 2022 

From this episode:

That is to be able to use this powerful but undeveloped introspection that we have coupled with aims for creating a world that works for all. It’s like giving our soul really great work to do and connecting with our essence.

In this episode:

This episode is helping us think about how our identity gets lost, confused or we can get panicked in times of personal, work or global change. And what to do about it.

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Transcript

Zac
Welcome back to Business Second Opinion Podcast. We’re always excited to bring you another episode.

We wanted to take a minute to thank all our supporters, of which there are many. But especially we want to thank Bryan Baer for being one of the people who has our back on Patreon. We love having you on our team, helping us to fund second opinions.

Business Second Opinion Podcast digs deep to explore questions about business and business practice. In the process of examining them, we give you a second opinion, usually a contrarian opinion, but one that is well tested and proven to give the outcomes you really want without the side effects. And by the way, if you want to learn more about how to work more closely with us, stay tuned at the end of the show.

Carol
Hi Zac.

Zac
Hey Carol, so given the impact of Covid-19 on all our lives and the great escape of people from their jobs and offices for better pastures, I think it’s time we look at identity crises of all kinds and what wisdom maybe HBR is offering on them. So, we’ve got an article today that was actually just released in HBR from January 28th of 2022 entitled When a Major Life Change Upends Your Sense of Self and I’m going to maybe butcher these names, hopefully not, by Madeline Toubiana, Trish Ruebottom, and Luciana Turchick Hakak. So go ahead Carol.

Carol
Yeah I couldn’t do them either. But we’re grateful for them for this article and I really agree with you. The timing is certainly right for this subject, and we have not really looked at it in the past in terms of what an identity crisis looks like and how it relates to roles and right now. Every workplace is consumed with it and the good news is the technology we work with offers a lot to help on this that I believe is a much better way to take it on than what this article proposes.

Zac
Let’s start with what our authors had to say and then show the contrast. The authors present 5 strategies, as they say that, “can help anyone come to terms with a new identity (whether you are happy with the change or not) and move forward on a path of identity grow rather than identity paralysis.”

  1. Mark a distinct break with the past – is all about creating a “tipping point” that enables people to make a change
  2. Craft a story to tie the past and present together – is all about creating a narrative that ties the old you with the new you together that’s easy to share with others
  3. Acknowledge and work through challenging emotions – is where we need to work through the emotional attachment to an old version of ourselves
  4. Focus on meaningful, non-work identities – often times the authors have found that people subsume their identities completely in a work context and instead they suggest people need to find alternative identities outside of work like within their family or personal lives 
  5. Don’t be afraid to fantasize – explored the idea of having people releasing an idealized version of the past for a more utopic future – allowing people to create a, as they say, a stepping stone to an ultimate future. In so doing this allowed participants in their research to find their present more palatable – potentially allowing them to find a new way forward.

Carol
Right? So what we invite people to do here on Business Second Opinion is not seek to make them wrong because we Zac and I both believe there’s value in what people are saying here. But it’s limited to kind of a specific case. Like after the fact but we want each of you to read their article examine it which is what we do and the first thing we go look at is what’s the paradigm they’re using to source this article and what does that have to do with what they can say. Zac, bet you have an opinion on that.

Zac
I think when taken as a whole the authors seem to, as other authors we’ve discussed in the past, be stuck as the level of personality. These well-intentioned strategies, look to help people detach from one personality and find a new one. This process, while on its surface is helpful, lacks a deeper understanding of humans, their inner working, and developmental processes.

Carol
And so what we’re going to do here today is point out what is missing and where this fits kind of in the overall scheme of things and I’ll give my take in a moment but I’d like to start back with what do you see as the big flaws or the big gaps.

Zac
What’s missing here is the idea of essence. In other words, the pattern behind the pattern of our inner selves. The process of uncovering essence is not one where we find it, and then we move onto the next thing. It’s that ongoing aspect of ourselves that can only be revealed through conscious reflection and work on ourselves. It’s not a goal or a new state, but one that’s always been there and requires a different mind to self-observe.

Carol
Yeah I often say I don’t… People say, “well where does it come from?” and I say well I wasn’t there before I was born but I suspect and I hold the idea that it came in with me. Part of that is having given birth to 2 children myself having raised 6 others 4 very closely and now grandchildren you can see and experience this kind of core process, the way they take on things from birth. We don’t know exactly but we do know from our experience that when we help a company and a person get grounded in essence thinking and then their own essence, it becomes like a gyroscope that can move. I don’t even know if that’s the right metaphor. That’s what pops in mind in the face of, a world moving in a spinning way. Zac what does your experience tell you about identity itself and how these strategies make a difference or don’t make a difference.

Zac
Yeah I mean I think as Carol said before this is not to make anybody wrong, right? That’s not what we do in the podcast and these strategies definitely help but they’re kind of like short term help to kind of help get people over a hump or kind of a roadblock. In my experience, there’s a deeper sense of self that can be revealed here and then worked with and grown over time that can help sense and shape a more meaningful direction in one’s life and so as I’ve worked with the idea of essence and more specifically my own essence over the past eight years it’s helped to inform I mean a lot of things right? Like the creation of my startup, how I parent, how I work to be a better son and brother, how I think critically about being a participant in democracy and and and and so on I think, without building the capability to be self-relective. 

Seeing where my essence can continually reveal a clear sense of me I don’t think I ever would have started my business, I don’t think I would have stepped into being a stepfather and a whole bunch of other kind of lifelong endeavors and if I could say one more thing actually to our community. We do this work individually. In with organizations to great effect as it can help inform a framework for how one approaches or groups of people approach all aspects of life. Not just personal and professional.

Carol
Right? And this is Zac said it’s not something you’ll go make up. It’s not a branding exercise. It’s something you have to build the capability to see what I call essence thinking kind of in in a nodal way and what is the node. An entity and that can be a lifeshed it can be a company, a neighborhood, a city. It can be an individual person. Ah so my thinking I ask you the question about what’s missing for me. I think there are three things at least three but three core things that are missing and most of these have to do with what kind of ableness you need from birth and from growing up and being in a family in school and work what kind of ableness. Do you need. Which includes mindset and a whole lot of education to live in an uncertain world. 

We’re kind of brought up in a straight line as though if we just learn how to be happy and learn how to find our career and the right job or the right company we built, we’ll be fine, but that’s not true. There is going to be volatility in the nature of a living system. Secondly, there’s something called energy drains which I really want to get your take on Zac and there is this incomplete or error written idea about what identity really means so let’s take them one at a time and we’ve already started this a little bit so there we don’t develop or grow in people the ableness to be self managing in the face of uncertainty we raise them to be able to cope and kind of adapt and the value of learning to be resilient and to be self-managing requires a certain kind of mental capability. You have to understand fear particularly and what that means. Zac this is a good question for you. How do you see the way fear gets generated and its effect on our sense of self?

Zac
So I unfortunately know this one really? Well so I think in my 42 years I think the thing I’ve come to understand is that fear at least for me is the emotional response of not being able to relate or make sense of an unfamiliar situation

Carol
Yeah.

Zac
You know an unfamiliar situation. It’s like we cannot connect to what’s happening so feel that it’s a threat. As a result, we allow ourselves to spin the circumstances of that situation out of control, misconstruing the true nature of what is in front of us. We recede into an older part of our brains, disabling creative thinking. We destabilize ourselves. I feel this quite often with a new sales call, a business meeting with new clients, meeting new people, and so on.

Core to our work is building the capability to be unperturbed in the face of uncertainty. Do I fail at this all the time – you bet. But the difference with work is, over time, seeing myself falling into that place of fear and being able to manage my state. This allows me to watch me, as I seek to build new relationships not only with others but also myself.

Carol
And I think the good news is I mean I’m twice your age and so what I’ve known is that over time I’ve been working on these ways of self observing and making sense of my fear and the good news is: It’s less and less destabilizing in the face of like a pandemic where someone eighty years old could die drop of hat. I’ve produced 2 books during that time and so we can step up to it. I think there are four things. Well let’s do three of them. That I have watched in my research and working with organizations and my change agent community that people tend to do when they get this disruption in identity: changing role, become an immigrant to a new country, end up going to jail and having come out create some horrible crime. Can you come back from all of that? And one of the things I’ve noticed is that for a long time people just adhere to what they knew because as you said fear is all about the unknown. So I keep making sure that what I’ve said is right. And of course I become more and more disturbed because I can’t find the familiar I can’t manage it and I just accommodate. So that’s like adhering. 

The second one I’m going to talk about today is that we then decide to adapt. We try to get some new unfolding reality and see some opportunities. Sometimes and I think that’s a lot of where this particular article steps in. It wants to help you adapt a bit and gives you some strategic task that you can do. One that we really work with. Yeah, and we work It’s not an after the fact oh you can use it that way. It’s best when you’re in a community which we have we don’t do trainings or trying to introduce people to short term kind of solutions. We have ongoing communities which are working on this all the time. And what they do is learn to build this interreflective capacity that’s introspection. They learned really to be able to make sense of what they’re doing, how they’re affecting and how they are, how they’re reacting with others. Particularly they’re able to set aims and from those aims they’re able to move and take as you said your essence with you. You moved out with your business and really blossomed during the the fearful crisis that we’re still in of Covid by taking your essence and and giving it aims and saying this is where we’re going. This is how we’re going to be and Essence is not an adaptation to a new identity. It’s going back to the ground of who we really are. Do any of those strike you as useful or interesting?

Zac
I know for sure had I not been in this school and this work, I would have continued to stay stuck in an adhere level of satisficing. Which more than likely would have kept me in healthcare indefinitely instead of striking out to form a company with my business partner. And what’s more we would not have had the will to grow that company through the pandemic, and I know that for sure.

Carol
Yeah, and I’m so happy how well you’re doing. Let’s look at the second error. We’ve mentioned it a couple times but this is one we’ve never done on our podcast and Zac said before we started we ought to come back to more on this and I agree. It’s what we call mental energy drains and this means you have all this trash going on in your head which you could see in this article like “I’m a bad person, I can never be good, I’m a failure I lost my profession when I came here I’m not able to have the identity,” all all that goes on. And we call we have six energy drains, three of which we want to just pick up on a small amount today. 

The first one. This really creates a crisis, we’re identified with our profession. We’re identified with our role. We’re identified with a particular view of how our family works and how we’re seen and what that means is if you attack it, you attack me. So if you attack me not being the civil engineer I was able to be in Iraq before I came here or the MD I was in Pakistan. You attack that loss of role I feel personally attacked and you will see people take on the internal considering of oh no, what I am and thought I was I had never noticed but I’m totally identified with it meaning there to the same and attachment. Is another one where what we do is get really stuck and I’ll I’ll let you come back and talk about that one and then fabrications is one of the risk of they’re talking about fantasizing ah because it turns out our brain can’t very well tell the difference and it’s the good news and the bad news.

It can’t very well tell the difference between a story we make up and reality we’re remembering calling to mind now. The good news side of that is it begins to look real and when you can’t see it really. I feel sometimes be activated to go do it but it also can be filled with energy drains and stories which are filled with old identity unless you have the reflective capacity. It’s very hard to do this. How about some examples. You’re always good at that Zac. How does this affects you and your business?

Zac
For sure. So, I’m trying to think about how I would frame that so I mean I think mental energy drains I think of if I I mean I we’re were we like to be very specific with metaphors here. But I think of it like a metaphor like a leaky boat right? Over time without ongoing management of my own energy drains, the boat of me for lack of a better term begins to sink or is already sinking and I was too tied up in my own head to notice. 

So right, let’s look at attachment, for example. So attachment is the idea that I make certain assumptions about the world and those become kind of fixed and rigid overtime and they become basically like horse blinders. So In my case, our team at different times has become attached to the idea that we’re a boutique action design studio alright? This is what we are. This is what we do. And if that was the case and we became completely attached to that we never would have explored all the other business opportunities that have showed up that have allowed us to gain inroads into film from a more technical visual effects standpoint rather than the action design side. So instead we would have become resentful I think of film and said we wanted nothing to do with it. Why aren’t they calling us back about all these stunt Jobs. We could have gotten and so for us, it’s been about managing attachment that has given us the freedom to understand how our industry is moving and how we might best serve it and our customers’ growth.

Carol
Yeah, and it’s pretty exciting. What’s come from the letting go of that attachment. The third thing I see missing from this article. We’ve hinted at and woven through everything was said up until now. But let’s add a little more on why people mistake personality in Essence and particularly in the role they play or the role that identity plays. So one of the things that’s helpful is to know that the family you grew up in the culture the country the time of in history are shaping. Your personality which the word literally means to put on a mask to put on an image of myself which of course then we become identified with because what we’ve created is our mask and that’s the meaning of the word to sound through a mask. So, personality is sounding through the mask. Essence doesn’t sound through something, it is coming directly from our deep understanding if we do that work to get to what our work is in the world how our way of being is in the world. Mine if you haven’t noticed is disrupt certainty. So no matter what you say to me I’m not trying to tell you’re wrong, but I will make you question it and the reason is that if you get stuck on one way viewing rather than saying this is why I’m currently thinking about it or this is the way like I always say I don’t know if karma exists. But right now I’m acting like it does because it changes how I live. Therefore I’m open to something new happening. So, getting that clear about personality and essence. I’m sure you can add something here and tell us how the authors are mixing these up.

Zac
Yeah, as I look back at the article now I think much of what the authors discuss here is missing the forest for the trees with identity, which by the way also happens to be another example of attachment at work. So in other words, if this process seems to help people.

Carol
Yeah.

Zac
Then this must be the way right? Because it’s working at least in their minds. But if you take a look at what we’re offering here. Essence is immutable and requires a different mind to be able to notice and while it shows up in various ways and times throughout our lives. That pattern remains constant whereas personality on the other hand is often given to us by our parents or institutions or is even fabricated whole hog, which is another energy drain. So a question that might help to open this door is. From where did I source this aspect of myself and so I know for me right? as a is a real example I find myself being overbearing with my kids from time to time raising my voice and wishing they would just do what I tell them to do which I’m sure is really unfamiliar for all parents.

Carol
Ah.

Zac
But over time I see I sourced this aspect of my personality for my parents as a way of hoping to instill in my kids in the same way that my parents did for me an attachment to safety and self-preservation and so this identity inherently limits my and their freedom. To make their own choices and their own mistakes.

Carol
And in some ways none of that is spoken to at all in this article. It’s all managing personality as you said in the opening and all the aspects giving it tricks that it can play. I think, let me give a little bit of a wrap-up and add one thing to before we say goodbye to folks today. I think there are a couple of kinds of adaptations most of which this article is and they’re what I call behavioral adaptations. And they’re based on the idea that we can’t be introspective it all has to be something we do out there all these tricks and write a new narrative connect the old with the new, make up things about what could be and so you can get excited about that. All those are using behavioral theory of a non-introspective person on themselves, by using problem solving approaches. So you make a transition symbolic like the day I woke up to this or you make a story about doing something for your kids so you can feel good about it. And the other thing is you can get other people to feel good about you. So again, these are accommodations and be a positive thinker. There’s so much research showing that positive thinking leaves your mind going always to the opposite, goes back to the negative and I’m a little bit startled, being trained as a psychologist to see that one in there because it’s been disputed and pretty much taken out of the the teachings. So this whole idea about behavioral, that this article and most corporate examples parenting all fall within this behavioral idea. 

The one we didn’t talk about today but let me throw in because a few of you will have thoughts about the concepts that come from it is the stoics. The stoic is how many people have worked to overcome the craziness in their life and what they do is talk about life as your teacher and I actually believe that also not quite the way the stoics do. Because the stoics give you exercises that if you practice in advance you find ways to for a moment go experience the really awful thing that could happen like being in prison. You lock yourself up and then when you come out, you’re able to reframe your whole life situation right now. All this one is based on the idea we can teach ourselves to have better responses again. That can be very useful. But it’s kind of palliative care where we’re desensitizing yourself to a life event. Ah there’s some part of it which I also think is helpful where you do like a meditation in motion where you’re watching a really horrible event and watching yourself helping you. Become have no reactivity again. This is pretty much um, working on making your life calmer, more able to work and again who’s going to argue with that. 

But I believe that it misses the whole idea of what is the purpose of having a human life. What is the role of being a human in having been granted a body so to speak. And that is to be able to use this powerful but undeveloped introspection that we have coupled with aims for creating a world that works for all. It’s like giving our soul really great work to do and connecting with our essence. But for this one to work the best way is to do it starting in childhood. I’m running a regenerative parenting and family group right now to talk about what this means, or community I should call it. 

I also believe institutions like education should help with this and learn my version of the life is teaching you which is karma yoga and that’s true and well at least 15 different lineages I’ve found which means see everything that’s happening in life. As a way of showing you how you’re engaging life not as I have to deal with it. But what am I attracting into my life by the way I’m engaging right now learning to grow ourselves from a young age learning reflection critical thinking skills premises to challenge ourselves. Building the institutions learning to see energy drains and using those to interpret and engage. But most importantly, we get through all the crisis in life when we have third line work, that is the role that can make us a difference in a system and a role we can learn to play based on our essence and then we can be a full human being but to do that we need to learn to develop and awaken consciousness the middle mental energy call consciousness and to be able to manage all the energy drains that will cause us to lose force, if we do not.

Carol
Business second opinion has been well received. I am so grateful to all of you and those who choose to support us like Bryan today. Thank you, we are taking on starting shortly like in March a new YouTube channel based on my book The Regenerative Life and it’s going to be the first thing I’ve done with interviews in a very long time but you have to participated in the Regenerative Life Project to do that you will find in the show notes a way to tap into that. And gain something for yourself because you will go through a do it yourself kind of project for a couple of months and then you’re gonna tell me a story which we will then bring you in your story to the YouTube channel.

Zac
We have launched a new community for parents in couples, family pods organized around the same children, and community pods of multiple family pods on applying regenerative principles to familying and bringing communities of families together. More at https://seed-communities.com/regenerative-parent/

Carol
My sixth book will be out within two weeks. Well that’s not true. It’ll be up and ready to pre-buy to buy in advance. It’s called Indirect Work.

A regenerative change theory for businesses communities institutions and humans and if you will go help support me making an Amazon bestseller by preordering if you will do that going through my website carolandford.com. You will find a bunch of bonuses that are designed to help sell in bulk and get discounts. So, come join me if you’re on my newsletter, you’ll learn when the day is to buy.