Bonds That Make Us Free, Session 3: What To Do When You Are Stuck
The “I” that pretends it wants to move forward can’t find a way to get unstuck
This image from a PowerPoint slide deck I created goes with a story. My role in delivering a leadership development program was presenting six workshop days spread over six months. A cohort of senior managers from across the organization was required to participate. Recommended readings and an online forum for dialogue allowed those who were interested to work between sessions. The participants were close colleagues; there was much goodwill, at least on the surface.
As you would expect, I got to know the participants over the months. The material was impactful enough that many came to me with questions they were “asking for a friend.”
I randomly picked Scott to feature in the slide because I intended to use gentle humor to illustrate a common workplace grievance. As I clicked on the slide, Scott became agitated, stood up, and pointed at a cohort member, saying, “You put him up to this, didn’t you?” “Him” meaning me.
Unknowingly, I had stumbled upon a contentious issue. Scott did go home at 5 pm each day, even when others worked into the evening.
After the outburst and nervous laughter, the room calmed. But at the break, individuals on each side of the issue wanted to plead their case to me. To each, the problem was obviously the other person. Yet, as C. Terry Warner writes in Bonds That Make Us Free, “Seeing other people as the problem is the problem.”
Practice: Notice the next time you are eager to tell your side of the story to someone so they will side with you. When this does happen, notice if you feel better or worse immediately afterward. The next day? Is the need to tell your story ever satiated? Or does the story become part of your identity that you seek to maintain?
In that workshop session, we experienced collusion in real time. Warner explains,
We concentrate on their misdeeds in order to have proof that they are to blame and not us. And they focus on our misdeeds for the same sort of reason. Thus, we and they set in motion round upon round of edgy and sometimes hostile interactions, in which each blames the other and exonerates himself or herself. Self-betrayal invites more self-betrayal, which invites more self-betrayal.
Contention over who was contributing more value had surfaced before. Those with direct client interaction routinely called IT leaders in the room “blood-sucking overhead.” The line was delivered jokingly, but the accusation was cutting.
Buttons were being pushed. I observed what Warner described as “colluders’ ability to hit each other’s buttons consistently and accurately, almost as if they took dead aim, knowing instinctively or by experience exactly how to get the other’s goat.”
Consider Warner’s biting words about delivering lines as in a Punch and Judy show:
Thus colluders only appear to control one another; in truth, they give control of themselves to one another, like people volunteering to play the part of puppets in a Punch and Judy show. They individually use their agency, which is their power to act, not in controlling the other but in allowing themselves to be controlled! They use their power to act to put themselves in one another’s power! We use words like touchy, thin-skinned, and hypersensitive to describe such people. Sometimes I have thought of them as missile-seeking targets.
In short, “colluders lock themselves together in a single, complex control system wherein each gives power to the others.”
In the lead-up to the trigger slide, we had considered the Warner/Arbinger idea of collusion as “a conflict where the parties are inviting the very things they’re fighting against.”
We had a dialogue on gratitude reflecting on insights such as these:
Gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, avarice, hostility, worry, and irritation. — Sonya Lyubomirsky
Gratitude is not only the greatest of the virtues, but the parent of all the others. – Cicero
As the Arbinger Institute puts it, “The more I become consumed by how my own needs aren't being met, the larger those needs seem, until I numb myself to the needs of others.” The participants’ response to the slide was an opportunity to observe this dynamic. Of collusion, Warner writes, “We cooperate in condemning ourselves to ongoing misery and woe.”
Warner insightfully reveals our motivation, “When others and I betray ourselves towards each other, we provide each other with what we most desire—justification.”
What we experience signals what we value and cherish. Warner writes, “Generally speaking, we share responsibility for the way we are treated. If we want to know what impact we are having on others, we need only to examine their responses to us.” Warner notes he is not talking about things clearly external to us, such as encountering criminal conduct.
As always, Warner cuts to the core of human behavior. In Bonds, Warner reveals his roadmap for overcoming ongoing relationship woes. Before he does, I want to introduce you to guidance from physician Angelo Dilullo, whose insights into the human condition complement Warner’s.
Something keeps us stuck in a cycle of collusion, but there is an actionable step to take now.