All we really have to fear is blind refusal to understand how things work and to use that information to our benefit. Like attracts like. Fear pulls in fear, anger calls anger, joy invites joy: that’s how things in this universe work. In this economic downturn, it is the best time to feel secure and joyful because financial leadership alone is never enough to pull us out of economic melt-downs. We need emotional leadership as well.
If what I hear during this financial crisis is true, psychology and perception play large roles in market ups and downs. People take financial risks, based in part, on how they feel. If it’s true that emotion and perception are so critical, what’s keeping our business and political leaders from providing the emotional leadership necessary to help our financial worlds rebound? Emotion is contagious, positively and negatively. Who will get the ball rolling?
Here’s how it works: positive emotion draws to us more positive circumstances. All you have to do is keep your traps open, be thoughtful about business decisions and (here’s the key) feel the feelings you have when things are the way you want them to be, but feel the positive feelings before things actually become the way you want them. By “traps” I mean the channels you use to receive sustenance from the world around you. Some people call that work or job or sales. That’s fine. We each have ways to receive from the Universe what we need to survive: milk from mother, welfare or subsidies from a parental figure, wages from a job, dividends or profit from your own business(s), profits from sales. Keep your doors open and feel the feelings you want to have because you choose to feel that way. Results will follow.
The emotional leader in a human group such as a business, corporate team or family does not have to be the designated leader on the org chart. It can be anyone, secretary, truck driver or vice president who is willing to make a choice to whistle in the dark, walk on the sunny side of the street or smile when financial reports are turning crimson red. It is possible to be very aware of dire circumstances but be in charge of your emotional reactions.
You’re going to pass time one way or the other. Why not feel good as you go through time? In the meantime, you could be the one who provides critical emotional leadership for your group. All you have to do is allow yourself to experience positive, safe and secure emotions while time passes. In the end, what we really have to fear is letting circumstances determine how we feel. There’s the real fear: being out of control of ourselves. As a leader, you can control how you feel even when you’re tempted to feel out of control. Others around you will pick that up and multiply the effect.
Cheers.
Paul Anderson, Senior Coach
1 comment:
Dr. Anderson is absolutely correct.. these are emotional times. I am not a professor, nor do I have the academic qualifications of Dr. Anderson, so I qualify my comments with the humble caveat that I have made my living for the last 30 years achieving very practical objectives...setting and beating annual P/L forecasts regardless of the unforeseen obstacles that inevitably arise during any fiscal year, making payroll when cash flow was tighter than the skin around a cabernet grape at harvest time, and convincing bankers to stay in the game with me despite all the reasons in the world why they should otherwise have taken their money out of my deals and headed for the hills.
I’m just the son of a missionary (who was the son of a sharecropper) who went into the ministry because that was a close to being a professional as he could ever hope to achieve after his family was chased out of the Oklahoma – Arkansas border by the dust bowl of 1929. My DNA is pure “Grapes of Wrath”...work at it until things change.
In circumstances like these, as Dr. Anderson observes, I would add a practical perspective to his comments. In the absence of positive emotional leadership, a “lynch the bastards” mob mentality will begin to create class war fare.
Already, today, bus loads of “protestors” – out of work, foreclosed, otherwise disenfranchised individuals – drove by the AIG manager’s homes in CT, with the resulting all too expected media sound bites about “excess, waste, conspicuous consumption” etc.
Are the bonus amounts egregious? Could the payments have been less and still achieved the same outcomes? Sure, the answer is YES to all. But, one should ask “If these AIG bastards were made to return all the money, and thrown in jail for the rest of their lives, what would it change? Would it fix the mess we’re in”? The answer is NO. But, it would begin to undermine the core reward-for-risk fundamental to our (at least for now) capitalist, laisse faire economic system, and certainly put into question the sustainability of ANY business contract, making it subject to voiding by simply enough people who think it should be otherwise. Where does it stop?
Mob mentalities (the absence of emotional leadership) are a dangerous thing, and in my view the ubiquitous, omnipresent, ever opinionated media have a good chance of fanning this situation into a very destructive, out of control scenario if they are not careful (negative emotional leadership).
Our system must be allowed to work. Companies, and individuals must be allowed to fail. I would offer the major difference between the bonused AIG managers and the bus loads of ‘protestors’ is simply opportunity and decimal places. Given the same chance, I doubt that few, if any, of those hewing and crying about the bonuses would decline the opportunity to receive the same payments.
We’re living with the third generation of entitlement-narcotized adults who have been taught by our government that it’s easier to live on welfare, food stamps and subsidized housing than to do what ever work is available (as did my dad and his dad before him) until things change and get getter (positive emotional leadership).
Pain is beneficial; we forget that. Pain tells us what not to do again. But, I fear we may be attempting to remove the pain from our economic situation too quickly, too broadly. If the policies of the past have failed in one way or the other, or the lack of oversight has created the opportunity for excess, we must change. Pain also improves future outcomes. It can make us stronger, wiser and more resilient. But we must take the long view, and be willing to make the hard choices over an extended amount of time in order for the (economic) freedoms we so cherish to survive. In the end, it is indeed an emotional matter.
Kim Anderson
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