I’m leading a discussion later this month on the Enneagram and Internal Family Systems for the Spiritual Life Foundation. Here is the general announcement. Please RSVP as described below if you’d like to attend. The session will be online via Google Meets.
Wednesday, April 20, 2022 – 7:30 PM PDT
Have you ever found yourself saying “a part of me feels like …” or “a part of me wants …” or “a part of me believes” …. Well, in the language of Internal Family Systems, that statement is more true than you might think. According to the Internal Family Systems model, in addition to our self, we all have multiple sub-personalities, or parts, that both arise from trauma and stress and provide a number of services to keep things running smoothly. In this session, we’ll explore the basics of the Internal Family System model and make connections between how these parts manifest themselves and our enneagram types. Come and explore new ways to get to know yourself and better understand and appreciate others.
This session will explore using the Enneagram in the context of the Internal Family System, IFS, model. Internal Family Systems is a powerfully transformative, evidence-based model of psychotherapy. The mind is naturally multiple and that is a good thing. Our inner parts contain valuable qualities and our core Self knows how to heal, allowing us to become integrated and whole. In IFS, all parts are welcome and have good intentions.
By this time next month, my regular paychecks will have stopped, to be replaced by something as yet not completely known, perhaps by nothing at all, but hopefully by something. A month ago, I lost my father; we weren’t particularly close, but he was my father and he was a life with his own dreams, scars, and sense of moving forward that is now extinguished. That’s sad no matter the relationship and getting this new perspective on his (and my own) life has taken time to process – time I had intended to prepare for that lost paycheck. I’m feeling OK, actually, going through things one at a time, with more of life unsettled than I would normally prefer.
I decided some time ago I needed to do something else, something different, a different environment, with my career. I applied and interviewed for a couple jobs – feeling like I was more interviewing than being interviewed; I wanted something different, not just a different color paycheck. I didn’t actually get any offers, and it probably appears like sour grapes to say I probably wouldn’t have accepted had I, so I won’t. But it was a good process and I learned things – about myself and my industry. For instance, I’ve now applied for a major facility Director position three times, to get invited to the panel interview each time, but never progressing beyond, and I now think I understand why. I also understand more about what’s important to me, what I am looking for in meaningful work, and what it would take to actually want and get such a position in the future, if that’s what I decide to do.
So, what’s my current plan? I’ve started Astromanager LLC and will be doing my own thing. I wrote myself a business plan so I could better lay out my thoughts for myself and to explain to others. I hope it will be a good start, but I doubt it will be an accurate roadmap to what actually happens in the end. I’m hoping to spend <~50% of my time doing meaningful, but temporary project-related work for astronomy – helping to get projects started, or through some tough spots, or filling in a temporary gap or need. With my experiences in the science, observations/operations, and technical/project sides of astronomy, I think I can fill a variety of needed roles and offer groups a way to seize opportunities they might not have otherwise. Is there a market for this? If there isn’t, I think there should be, and judging by the inquiries I’ve received already, I’m optimistic there is a real mutual need here I can address. I’m really grateful for the support I’ve received so far and in addition to fearing I won’t have enough work offers, I am beginning to fear I may have too many.
I want to spend the other ~50% of my time on my coaching and training material – a lot of which I’ve discussed here already. I’ve got content on workplace productivity, anti-productivity, project management, leadership, teamwork, systems engineering, and personal and professional growth. I think there’s relevance here to a more general audience beyond astronomy that I’d like to explore. I also think there’s value in continuing to bring these ideas to astronomy and the broader technical/academic world, particularly to students and those in early career stages. A colleague told me today that she thought our training teaches us the technical aspects of our industry, but it doesn’t teach us how to be humans; how to relate to others; how to get our ideas across and accept others’, etc. I’ve learned, and am still learning, most of this the hard way. How great it would have been to figure this stuff out earlier. I’d like to help others learn some of my lessons earlier than I did.
Contributing to both efforts, I’ve got too many ideas for new content I want to generate, blogs I want to write, books I want to publish, videos I want to make, and communities I want to engage with. It’s both exciting and scary and with an office full of boxes from my father’s estate, and soon to be from my old office, it’s all a bit jumbled right now. I’ve got a business plan, a great network of friends and colleagues, and a path through the boxes. I think I’m going to make it and I hope you’ll be here for, and help me along, the journey.
Want to find that secret manual that tells you how to behave in all situations, overcome life’s challenges, reach your potential, and connect with those around you? I spent years looking for such a manual, one that I was convinced everyone else had access to, but I didn’t. My answer now: read a book! Well, a novel, really. Or some poetry. A biography, if you must, but preferably not. Find a fiction best seller list and start reading. Why? Well first let me give you some background.
Some years ago, probably around the time I started reading management books, but likely even before that, when I read technical books, history, or scientist biographies, I not only stopped reading novels, but I sort of proudly declared myself devoid of time to read fiction. Who could be bothered with fiction when there’s so much to learn from non-fiction? Well, me, for one. Or, at least I should have been.
Another useful bit of useful background is the impostor syndrome. I could do a whole post about the impostor syndrome (and frankly, I’m kind of surprised I haven’t by now), but I think it’s a concept that is becoming pretty well known these days, so let me just summarize it as that common feeling we get that we are not really qualified to do what we are doing and that some day, someone will discover that we’ve just been faking it and the gig will be up. The origin of the impostor syndrome is easy to understand: we all know our own self doubts or struggles and yet, we don’t talk about them and more specifically, those we work and interact with don’t talk to us about their doubts and struggles – they only tell us all the great things they can do. Modern, curated social media tends to make that sense even worse. We end up with the misguided impression that everyone else knows what they’re doing and we know we don’t, so we feel like an impostor.
One of the ways out of the syndrome is recognizing that everyone has feelings like this and everyone has their own doubts that they just don’t talk about. If you are an impostor, so is everyone else around you, so who cares any more?
I admit I still find myself feeling like a professional impostor at times, but then I remember what I just said above and I remind myself that while there is always someone who knows more about a specific topic than I do, or more about more different things than I do, I also know more than others. I tend to go deeper than most people who are as broad and broader than most people who are as deep. That’s my trick and it’s been my strength and niche and it sort of keeps the professional impostor at bay.
But what I only recently realized is that while the professional impostor was reasonably dealt with, the personal one has been front and center in my life for a long time, without me even being aware of it. I truly believed that everyone else in nearly every life context had the secret manual that I somehow never got a hold of. They all knew how to act, behave, and overcome life’s obstacles in ways that I simply didn’t. Why was I so messed up and struggling in things everyone else just got?
Scot’s missing secret manual. Image made at canva.com.
You’d think a look around my own extended family (and I don’t think we’re very different from most other families) would have assured me that wasn’t the case: plenty of failed relationships and divorces, various struggles with addictions, family members cutting each other off or not talking to each other…. Those aren’t the outcomes of people that have the secret manual. My family provided plenty of evidence that it wasn’t just me, but I didn’t really see it.
So why didn’t I get the lesson that everyone struggles with life and it’s not just me when I had ample evidence within my own family? Well for one, although these struggles existed, we still never talked about them. We didn’t talk about the mistakes we were making or the doubts and uncertainties we had. So, although I saw the results of normal people struggling with life’s challenges, I could still safely ascribe the troubles to circumstances or one-off issues, not universal cluelessness as we all struggle with finding our path through life.
Even my history and biography reading could have conveyed this message to me, but I didn’t hear it there either. Partially, because their purpose is usually not the struggle itself, but the resolution, thereby tending to actually increase the impostor feeling in the reader. And partially because, as with my family, I applied the inverse fundamental attribution error1 – I attributed good intentions and bad circumstances to others’ misfortunes and incompetency and failure to my own.
My personal impostor was so strong that I saw others’ struggles and undesired outcomes, I vowed not to replicate them, and yet I continued to believe everyone else knew what to do and only I struggled to get through life and find happiness, connection, and fulfillment within it. Universal incompetence at solving life was right in front of me, but I was blind to it and believed I was the only incompetent one.
Years ago, I started to include fiction back in my reading list, and meeting a poet at a friend’s gathering once, I began to read (and later write) some modern verse. I was listening to a lot singer songwriters (having already gone down the Blues rabbit hole years before). Who writes more songs of struggle and pain than singer/songwriter-types and Blues musicians? Every book, every verse, every lyric, every movie even – all were further evidence that to struggle, to mess up, to be lost, are all part of the human condition. And yet, still, I remained blind, and thought it was only me – that I was the only one without thesecret manual.
I’m not sure what eventually opened my eyes, but they did open and I began to share some of my doubts and struggles with others and I got back not just sympathy and empathy, but an understanding of others’ life struggles as well. We began to talk about what we never talk about and I became more open to the idea that maybe it wasn’t just me. Maybe it’s all of us. I now see this in every book I read, movie I watch, song I hear. This message is everywhere, yet, apparently, it’s also surprisingly easy to ignore.
I now wonder if this isn’t the primary purpose of literature, stories, movies, poetry, music, theatre (has to be spelled in the British style in this context): to talk about what we don’t talk about to help people realize we are not alone, we all struggle, and no one has all the answers. It was there in front of me, in front of all of us, all this time. We just have to see it and we have to be willing to talk about it and share our doubts and struggles with each other. It is through this work that we will overcome our obstacles and connect with humanity around us in ways impossible in curated social media.
The secret manual? I’m beginning to think this is it. We all struggle. We are all impostors. There is no secret manual. This is the secret manual. It’s not a secret. Talk about it. Share it with someone. That’s how we get through this. Together.
1 The fundamental attribution error – our tendency to apply malice or ill intent to other people’s behaviors and environmental circumstances and good intentions to our own. The person that cuts us off on the road is a jerk and a lousy driver; when we cut someone off it’s because we were distracted and inadvertently made a mistake. It’s interesting that I’ve never thought before about how the impostor syndrome actually reverses this logic. Either way, though, the assumption generally remains an error.
I should have known better. I do know better. But last week, I didn’t prevent it when I could have and boom – I was hijacked by my amygdala. An amygdala hijack (google the web for lots more on the subject) basically occurs when your adrenaline increases and you find yourself reacting in a far more emotional way than the situation warrants. It is usually a sign of feeling threatened resulting in your amygdala kicking in to help you protect yourself. The result, at least in our modern world where we are more often confronted by an aggressive colleague rather than a saber-tooth tiger, is often an overreaction that can cause more trouble and more long-lasting damage than the initial situation itself.
The key to avoiding the amygdala hijack is to see it coming and stop it before it stops you. Listen to your feelings and ask yourself why you are feeling the way you are. In most cases, you can make yourself realize that you feel threatened in some way that probably wasn’t intended and you can work more calmly and more systematically to address the issue rather than jumping immediately and aggressively into fight or flight mode. If you know what your hot buttons are, you can usually identify them as the cause for your high emotions and can then cancel the amygdala’s red alert and act more rationally.
Alas, in one particular instance last week, I did none of this. I felt threatened and I attacked back. Luckily, the “threat maker” stopped and took control of the situation, allowing me to see the hijacking that was going on and stop it. In the end, I thanked my colleague for taking the time to do so, but I wished I had stopped it myself. So, what happened?
I had earlier received an email I did not like from this colleague. I felt she (or maybe it was a he? 😉 ) was threatening my team and telling me what I was allowed to do with them. That was not of course, what she meant, as it turns out, but this is one my hot buttons, and I got angry over the email and told myself that she was not going to get away with that. No one was going to limit the progress of my team. Who does she think she is? It was at this point that I should have caught myself. My reaction was over and above what was appropriate for the email. And it was an email after all; they are so easily misinterpreted that you should never get mad over an email. I knew that, but I did not stop myself. I allowed the hijacking to begin. Seeing my hostile reaction, I should have stopped myself right there and asked myself what else my colleague could have meant in her email. If I were giving her the benefit of the doubt, what was she trying to tell me? With this framework in mind, I should have talked to her at the next opportunity to see what she really meant. If necessary, I could calmly indentify my fears and help her understand the performance and independence of my team are important to me, but that probably would not have been necessary; she was not threatening me or my team at all, but I didn’t see that. I was being hijacked.
So, the next day when our paths crossed in the hall, I was still annoyed at this email so when she asked me what I thought about it, I got aggressive. It briefly escalated from there as I told her that she couldn’t tell me how to run my team, etc., until she took a breath and started a sentence with something like “Scot, I’m feeling a little bit … now” and started to tell me how she was feeling about our interaction. The adrenaline was still pumping in me (I could feel my heart beating), so I wasted no time in telling her how I was feeling, as well. It wasn’t nice, but acknowledging why I was feeling angry started my hijack recovery process. It was the step I should have taken when I got that earlier email. (And in hindsight, my colleague’s “I feel” statement seems like a very good way to respond to an amygdala hijack in someone else.) I started to calm down and realize what just happened. I began to realize why I was upset and how that was not really a result of anything my colleague had actually said or done. I was able to calm down and listen and talk to my colleague in the way I normally do to solve problems for mutual benefit. After a few more moments, we got to the core of the issue and reached a good agreement. Where only a few moments ago, I was ready to go to battle with this person, I now felt we had formed a successful partnership in understanding and meeting our mutual needs.
What a great outcome that I would have missed out on completely had my colleague not helped me tame my amygdala. I am grateful to her for doing so and I made a note to myself to pay more attention to these situations in the future. Watch my emotions, watch where they are coming from, and when I feel that rush of adrenaline when there isn’t a wild animal leaping towards me, take a step back and address the issue calmly.
As an enneagram 3, being in touch with his emotions is not one of Scot’s natural strengths. Being so, however, has great benefits both personally and professionally, so it is an area he constantly works to improve, with some success and the occasional setback.
In my last post, I discussed some thoughts from reading Conger, Lawler, and Finegold’s Corporate Boards book. Here is something else that caught my eye in that book that has near universal applicability -not just to corporate (or observatory) boards.
In a section of the book on how boards can/should review themselves, the authors write about why most boards don’t end up reviewing themselves in any meaningful way:
There was a concern it might cause disharmony in the group. It was that primitive notion of what creates more effective teams. ‘Effective’ teams in this case, are where you skirt issues of difficulty, or personal differences. It’s more like ‘We want to be able to have a drink together and like each other’ as opposed to ‘If we confront ourselves on real issues, we’ll deepen the relationship.’
There’s not much more that needs to be said after the authors’ summary. Too often people, managers, team leaders, team members, employees, fail to raise an issue for fear of being confrontational, of being thought of as not nice. There’s a common (mis)perception that if we confront people, if we speak up when something is wrong, then we are not being nice; we are not being good colleagues; we are poisoning the congenial atmosphere. This attitude is, of course, silly, as the above passage points out. By not confronting the real issue, by not making these tough decisions, we may establish a superficial pleasantness, but we don’t ever dig any deeper and build real understanding that leads everyone to peak performance and a more satisfying environment.
Confronting people does not make you tough or mean. You can confront someone in a mean, objectifying way, or you can confront people in a helpful, supportive, personal way. We’ve all heard of stories (usually told of great managers) who fired someone only to have them return some time later and be quite successful. Were these people fired in a mean-spirited, impersonal way? Probably not. They were probably fired with sincerity, reflecting on the fact that their employment in their current role was not only not working, but was of little benefit to either party. They were fired with honesty. They thus created the opportunity to learn from life’s problems. Firing, reviewing, confronting someone with malice or dishonesty at heart does not provide a foundation from which anything greater can develop.
Same behavior, different attitude. You can “be mean” and confront someone or you can “be nice” and confront someone. Honest confrontation meant to improve the relationship, the teamwork, and the results is not only healthy, but necessary for high performance. Skirting around the interpersonal issues gives you two people who can go drink together, but who won’t ever build a bond and a team that will lead to greatness.
While Scot hopes he will never be fired with either good or bad intentions, he does look forward to opportunities to develop an honest, deeper understanding with his colleagues, although seizing these moments is still not always as easy as he would like.
Well, it’s been a year now since I started this blog. I thought I should commemorate the occasion by writing something deep and reflective. The problem is, I’m not very good at deep and reflective. So, you’re stuck with this post instead.
A close friend of mine used to call me Mr. Spock, a nickname I was both proud of and resentful of. I was pleased that my friend thought me logical, efficient, direct, and striving for optimization, all like Mr. Spock. I was a bit bothered that he presumably also thought me lacking of emotions, the other defining characteristic of Mr. Spock.
I realized, though, that like Mr. Spock, I grew up thinking that my feelings and emotions merely got in the way of getting things done. (That my personal focus was/is on getting stuff done and not on feeling good, or making meaningful bonds with other people, etc., is another interesting note that will have to wait for some other post- maybe this blog’s second anniversary!) If something had to get done, it didn’t really matter what I thought of about it – it still had to get done. What I came to realize, perhaps intuitively, and perhaps as a mechanism to keep the focus off me, was that the feelings and emotions of other people did matter to them getting things done. If I wanted to do things that involved more than just me, I had to take the feelings, emotions, desires, and needs of others into account.
I started learning about what was important to others completely unaware of what I was doing. For one thing, focusing on other people kept them from focusing on me. I’ve always done things like ask my barber how she got started cutting hair, how she decided this is what she wanted to do, how she handles doing a hair cut the customer requests, but which she doesn’t like, …. I didn’t consciously teach myself to ask questions like these – it was just part of who I was. People love to talk about themselves, and it helped me in that I didn’t have to.
Happy First Birthday to astromanager.net!
Later on I realized these sorts of questions, and the insights they offer, are exactly some of the keys I needed to have to be a better manager. Strangely enough, not everyone is like me, so if I’m going to get the best out of people, I have to understand their needs and desires. I have to be sensitive to their feelings and moods. I can’t treat them as chess pieces to be placed on the board in a winning position if they don’t want to be there.
There wasn’t really a particular day or moment when I realized these things; as I said before, I found myself naturally doing some of them way before I ended up managing people and projects. But I will say that as I gradually learned to pro-actively use this approach as a regular way of interacting with people, I became much more effective. (I also learned to build better relationships with people. Imagine that.)
Simple concept, really- learn what people want and find ways to help and enable them to get it.
Management, though, is full of simple concepts, yet we don’t always follow them. The tradition hierarchy of executive privilege, need to know information, top-down decision making, and etc., all violate these simple concepts. Yet they have often been so instilled into our consciousness of what management is, that we can all too easily forget about the people side of management, and we end up blindly following these rather unnatural techniques of the past.
So, part of my reason for writing this blog has turned out to be to remind myself of these obvious tenets of people and project management. And like most things I do, if I can save others time by offering something I’ve done, then the return for my time spent has increased and I’ve made Mr. Spock proud by being even more efficient.
While this blog is helping Scot be more like Mr. Spock in terms of optimization and efficiency, he’s still working on distancing himself from Mr. Spock’s dry, emotionless nature. His 8-month old daughter is certainly helping in this regards and although he hopes she grows up to know and love Mr. Spock, he hopes she doesn’t completely identify him with Daddy.
