Worth a Listen, Look or Read — Physician, Heal Thyself

Better relationships with others starts by looking in the mirror.

Jeff Ikler here for Kirsten Richert with our weekly “Getting Unstuck” mini feature: “Worth a Listen, Look or Read.” Here in under five minutes, we extend the main idea of the week through a new way of thinking, unique content, or critical skills to help leaders at any level get unstuck.

The idea

In this week’s “Getting Unstuck” episode, we talked with Dr. Deborah MacNamara, a school counseling psychologist on why it’s important for leaders to establish a relational culture. https://bit.ly/2RY1nEz Deborah defines culture simply as what’s it like to be in a place – what are the rules, rituals, customs, beliefs? And knitting all of that together in a healthy relational culture are relationships.

Extending the idea

Interpersonal relationships are critical, but their success may be dependent on intrapersonal relationships – the relationship we have with ourselves. And that’s where we’re going to focus in this installment of “Worth a Listen, Look, or Read.”

It was serendipitous that as I was in the process of writing up my notes on my interview with Deborah, I spoke with an associate school superintendent about this past school year. As more of a clinical observation than a cry for sympathy, she concluded “I’ve been working seven days a week and really haven’t had a break in over a year. I’ve got to find some balance.” COVID had certainly impacted her situation, but she couldn’t lay all the causation at COVID’s doorstep.

As a leadership coach, I placed her observation of self in a mental file and listened as she went on to describe the end-of-year remarks she offered to her faculty. After an exhausting year, she encouraged staff to replenish its energy over the summer and bring focus to its planning of the next school year:

• "We can't do everything."

• "There is only so much energy."

• "What can we put on hold?"

• We have to set priorities around what matters."

If she were making a connection between her need for balance and her staff to be more prudent when it comes to choosing where to focus their energies in the future, she didn’t voice it. And I suspect she didn’t voice it because she couldn’t, at least not yet.

I believe that my school colleague may have been experiencing what psychologists call the “empathy gap” – the struggle for people to understand mental states that are different from their current state. This gap can pertain to our relationship with other people, which may explain some of our current social and political divide. But it can also pertain to the relationship we have with ourselves. One aspect of the empathy gap is our inability to imagine our future self. It’s one reason we can remain stuck in our unproductive and unhealthy present.

Clinical psychologist, Dr. Meg Jay explains in the following TED Talk that “it can be difficult to care about a version of ourselves that we haven’t met yet.” But as Dr. Jay reveals, it is possible to close the gap between our present self and future self. By asking ourselves a series of probing questions, we enable ourselves to think about what we could do now to be kinder to ourselves in the future.

Asking the types of questions Dr. Jay recommends about our future causes us to pause and deeply reflect on our current state. My colleague is headed there with “I have to find balance,” but saying those words alone is not enough. I believe those of us who have uttered those words – and I count myself among those who have – need to do some mental, heart and soul excavating to find the reasons for our personal imbalance in the first place. We need to ask, “What of my internal make-up and life experiences are allowing external circumstances to rule supreme — and keep me out of balance?”

By asking that question, we slow the wobbly treadmill of life and embrace self-compassion. And by becoming infinitely more self-compassionate, we awaken a deeper relationship with ourselves.

And we begin to close our personal empathy gap.

Putting the idea to work

• How “out of balance” are you?

• What’s your practice of pausing and reflecting on your current state? Never? Sometimes? Often? With what results?

• How in-tune are you with your future self?

Jeff Ikler