To Grow is to Grapple

To grow is to grapple with what stands in the way of change, much of which is in your head. The challenge is to get whatever it is—a screwy thought, a needless fear—out of the way. That’s where grappling comes in.

To raise your game as a leader, it’s often not enough to work on your form, your technique. You typically also need to work on your mental game, adjusting it in some way.

Blockers to Growth 

There are two broad classes of mental blocks:  crooked thinking and trigger points.   Never assume that otherwise rational people are completely free of off-base notions. This is where crooked thinking comes in. Here are some examples:

An off-base operating assumption. One leader backed off too much on the assumption that the people on his team wanted plenty of autonomy. He was projecting his need for autonomy onto them, a need that arose in childhood. His parents were careerists and neglectful of him. He had  created a virtue out of a psychological imperative—to be self-sufficient. To be a better supervisor he had to distinguish between his needs and his people’s needs, which was for him meant to get more engaged.

Warped weightings. The weight a leader places on the various parts of his or her job determines everything. One leader told us, “I’ve always believed that being effective means knowing things and getting things done.” It’s not that he had no idea that relationships matter. It’s that the interpersonal part of his job did not figure prominently in his mind. And guess what; relationships were his weak suit. He had to grapple with the low importance he placed on relationships. If you don’t value something, you’ll never get good at it. On the other hand, placing too much weight, too much importance, on a feature of one’s work is a surefire way of overdoing it and trading off something equally important.

Faulty gauge. A faulty gauge is another type of crooked thinking. It’s like getting caught for speeding only to find that your speedometer reads 10 miles per hour slower than the car is actually going. One leader’s gauge was faulty in the opposite direction. She thought she was more assertive than she actually was, and it puzzled her that other people weren’t responsive to her requests. The problem was she spoke softly and her voice lacked edge. I asked her to speak more forcefully with me and she had great difficulty doing it. She thought she was speaking louder and more authoritatively than she was.

When it comes to trigger points, there are two broad classes of emotional drivers.

Hang-ups. Hang-ups are what hold us back. A functional head ran his own function well but was perceived by his peers as “underwhelming.” They faulted him for not keeping them well enough informed. What held him back: an aversion to self-promotion, to tooting his own horn. He explained, “My family had a strong negative reaction to boastfulness.” He confused informing people and promoting himself.

Hot buttons. Hot buttons are what cause us to cross the line. For example, leaders who bring up their compensation too often and advocate too strongly for a higher salary or a bigger bonus. Also, leaders who overreact emotionally because they are quick to read a situation as a betrayal of trust, as being taken advantage of; they have difficulty trusting they have yet to make allowances for.

Remedies for Grapplers 

People re-condition themselves all the time through ceaseless repetition, brute persistence, or just by making up their minds to make a change and they make it. You may want to break a bad habit with your bare hands and sometimes that works, a direct attack on the sub-optimal behavior. The only problem is that often this approach doesn’t work. Nothing changes or the effort peters out.

But there’s nothing wrong with going right after the needed change. And if it doesn’t come easily, that just means another type of grappling, which takes two forms:

Forcing yourself involves making yourself do what you avoid doing or don’t do enough of, for example, being direct with someone whose work you’re not satisfied with, or shying away from financials because you’ve never been comfortable with numbers. You can, however, force yourself to correct for underdoing something.

Catching yourself involves correcting for overdoing something, like talking too much or getting into too much detail. Catch yourself in mid-flight or, better yet, get to know the impulse and nip overkill in the bud.

Upping Your Game 

Raising your game means working on your mental game, not just directly on your play on the field, i.e. your form or technique. People know all about mental games when it comes to sports or other types of performance, but when it comes to their own mental game, much of it is cloaked in mystery.

You want to change or you’re expected to change, but you’re up against something that can’t be seen with the naked eye—the way your mind works. To get that something out of the way or vanquish it, you first have to pinpoint what it is. And many times that something lies below awareness. Some feature of your mindset or emotional life is throwing off your form, but that causal relationship is lost on you. Therefore, the first order of business is to find out what you’re up against. You can’t grapple unless you can see your opponent. Shadow boxing gets you nowhere.

Self-analysis via introspection may get you there. But self-insight is elusive. People actually believe what they believe. A cherished belief is one that’s hard to call into question. It’s tied into one’s core identity. That entrenched lack of perspective makes it difficult to see a mental block for what it is.

Also, digging around in your psyche can quickly get uncomfortable, particularly on sensitive points. Discomfort can warn a person off. A certain mental toughness is required.

To do the mental work on yourself, you may need a guiding hand. If you go this route, be careful who you choose. Not everyone who calls themselves a coach is good at it or can be trusted to give you safe passage.

Keep on Grappling 

Stick with it. This wrestling match with yourself is usually longer than one round, and sometimes much longer depending on the rate at which a person is able to evolve. Yet, nothing is more important to your effectiveness and your well-being than to keep growing and adapting.

Contrary to what many people pessimistically or fatalistically believe, change is possible if you’re brave enough and willing to put in the work of grappling with yourself, and you get good help in doing that work.

Written by Bob Kaplan.