What does it take to be successful?
Dear Team Joy,
A few announcements this week before we jump in:
Into the substance:
Success, be more shiny
I went to a keynote talk last week delivered by a former tech executive turned leadership coach, all about creating success at work.
She was beautiful, smart, high-energy, and polished. Her talk was seasoned, filled with poignant one-liners and short-bursts of scheduled live interaction from the audience.
Yet I sat there, and thought, I hate this.
And just as clearly as I felt disdain, I also felt surprise. Why do I hate this?
I looked around the room and could tell my skepticism was likely not shared. I asked a few audience members after the talk what they thought, and the feedback was almost universally positive. They said it was, “Nice. Always good to have some helpful reminders to set boundaries, not people-please, ask for what you want. Just be bold. Time box, don’t multitask etc.”
The talk had the tone of an ambiguous, non-threatening vanilla ice cream cone - seemingly delicious, universally liked, non-threatening and digestable. All upside.
But it was the superficiality and lack of vulnerability that irritated me. The subtext of her talk was,
“If you could just get out of your own way, you too could be living a shinier life.”
This narrative grates a particular pet peeve of mine, right in line with corporate executives telling you to meditate…while also perpetuating a culture that breeds anxiety disorders.
We love to pretend that collective challenges are individual phenomenons with individual solutions.
Boundaries. Time-box. Be brave, send the email.
I actually advocate for all of these things, and yet hearing them parroted back to me, I felt their emptiness. It’s not that these skills are not useful (I think setting boundaries can be life-changing). But I am realizing these skills need to be put in the context of our culture, to have any chance of actually solving what we are really after.
So many of us struggle with the sense that we are running out of time, that we need to multi-task, and that we can’t say no. But we view our inability to get a hold of these challenges as an individual pursuit.
But if 80% of people have the same challenge then it’s helpful to be aware of what’s happening culturally. When we pretend collective problems are individual problems, it keeps us stuck in cycles of shame individually, and suffering collectively.
If you can’t figure it out, you’re the problem. Keep grinding.
The people who have “figured it out” share back tid-bits and techniques for success, just like this leader. When the system has largely worked for you, you share what worked for you to succeed in it. You don’t share all the ways in which the system made you (and other people around you) crumble because you seemingly were one of the lucky ones who got out alive. This perpetuates the narrative of individual success.
But I want leaders who help me understand the culture we’re in. What’s the pollution in the water we are all swimming in? Help us understand why its toxic, and lead us in efforts to clean up the river. Instead of telling the people that are drowning that they might get to the other side too if they just swam a bit harder, or did more breast stroke. 🙄
As a country we perpetuate individual narratives of success without acknowledging the flip side of the equation. …if I am individually responsible for my success, I am also inherently individually responsible for my own suffering.
Success is a multiplayer game
Wrestling with her ideas on success, has helped me to sharpen mine. Since I heard her speak, I have been trying to put words to what I think she got wrong.
It comes down to our core beliefs about the value of individual success and how we achieve it.
Let’s start with politics. Stay with me, I promise it will circle back around. 😬
We have two dominant stories about success: shifting between rugged individualism and systemic interventions.
Republicans (generally speaking) are known for advocating for economic policies that support individual agency…pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you too can be part of the American dream no matter what systemic forces might seemingly be against you. You succeed or suffer on your own efforts. It’s individual accountability.
Democrats (generally speaking) are known for advocating for systemic solutions including expanding social services. Systemic inequality in our society is not best fixed by individual effort, but instead by the government to support those experiencing hardship. These services are critical for many, but they are also bureaucratic, require lots of hoops, and are often broad policies inflexible to individual needs. Many people who use these services are frustrated, disconnected and disempowered. It’s system accountability but its faceless. It’s not intimate care.
On one side we are completely responsible for ourselves (both empowering and unrealistic). On the other, the system is responsible for us. Both of these stories inadvertently lead to shame for those who have “failed”.
What I believe is missing from both of these stories about success, is the true shared conviction that we succeed or suffer together. Collective accountability.
I’ll share one way this plays out in my own life:
If I believe that I succeed or fail alone, all on my own efforts, then the fact that I am dealing with a chronic disease means I am a failure.
I have failed. I can’t be the quintessential productive member of society I once was, which in turn means I can’t live the happy life I was promised.
Yet, that’s not quite the whole story.
6 in 10 adults in America live with a chronic disease according to the CDC.
Chronic disease include autoimmune conditions (8% of the population), but also include the big illnesses we think of (Heart Disease, Cancer, Diabetes).
That’s an absolutely staggering statistic.
Are 60% of Americans responsible for failing individually?
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Or are we failing collectively to prioritize what’s important? To keep each other healthy? To care?
I interact with systems everyday that I did not design that impact my ability to thrive:
I did not design our healthcare system to be so expensive.
I did not design our food system to prioritize convenience over sustainability.
I did not make social media apps to be toxic and addictive.
I didn’t create the mainstream work culture to be obsessed with optimizing productivity and maximizing profit.
So how is it possible that I am individually responsible for my own suffering?
I do have personal agency within each of these systems (I can get a flip phone. I can afford organic groceries). Yet still, my nervous system is in dysregulation mirroring other systems in society in dysregulation.
It’s going to be very hard for me to be healthy, if we are collectively unhealthy.
When we understand what we are collectively experiencing, it helps us to understand how hard change will be for ourselves and our people. Not impossible but very hard.
That’s our first challenge, believing we’re solely responsible for our outcomes (positive or negative). The second is going after the wrong target.
The truth is most of us don’t really want the success she’s selling anyways. Perfect. Impenetrable. Shiny.
We think we do.
We strive and yearn for it, being able to crawl out of her humanity and skip the messy emotional complexity of being human.
When I help clients unpack what real success means for them, here’s what I hear:
Building financial prosperity, making a meaningful positive difference in other people’s lives, being recognized and respected by their peers, finding a sense of personal fulfillment from pursuing goals and projects that are meaningful, nurturing important relationships, and feeling strong physically.
Every single one of these goals requires support and connection with other people. It requires other people to be thriving too. It requires us to be vulnerable instead of shiny. We are wired for community and collective problem solving. For the few who do succeed individually, grinding their life away, it’s often heartbreakingly unsatisfying.
We cannot succeed alone.
If 60% of us are sick, then we are collectively failing.
If 70% of us are disengaged at work (according to a study by Gallup) then we are collectively failing.
If 50% of us report experiencing loneliness (according to the surgeon general) then we are collectively failing.
If these were the metrics for an individual business, that company would fail.
Viewing our results in the context of our culture, helps to relieve shame and generate self-compassion.
When we are stuck in cycles of shame, thinking, “How could I fail, why am I the only one who can’t figure this out?” we can’t ease our own suffering. We light ourselves on fire with toxic criticism. We begin to believe, I did this. I failed myself.
But there’s the lie. You didn’t cause this. The river is toxic. You are not alone, you are not the only one suffering. And also, we are accountable to each other to do something about it.
Collective responsibility is the acknowledgement that we succeed or fail together. It begins with us, and then in our most important systems: our families, our work-teams, our communities.
I don’t know exactly how to execute on this, but I have the intuition that it’s important. I also have the hunch that we will need a different set of skills for going after a different target. In place of time-boxing, we’ll need compassion, emotional intelligence, nervous system regulation, and mindfulness. We’ll need norms and systems that support those behavior changes.
That’s what I have so far.
In the spirit of this article, I am very curious to hear your thoughts. I’ve laid out a starting point, tell me what I got wrong, and make it better. 💚
Understanding myself in a broader story, has helped me to offer myself compassion. I didn’t cause my illness. I am worthy of receiving support and care. I am not alone in my suffering.
As I am healing, I can see more clearly what caused my suffering. The processes around me that cause us harm and the cultural beliefs that we have internalized that uphold those processes.
As I understand those beliefs more clearly, they run my life less and less.
I used to get stuck in narratives of how things should be, filled with resentment and anger, at the fact that I was suffering.
Now, I can begin to imagine how things could be, from a more sober understanding of how things actually are.
It took me writing all of this to fundamentally understand:
She’s on a mission to help people individually succeed. I thought I shared her goal.
It turns out I am much more interested in what it will take for myself and all of us to heal and thrive.
Curious to hear your thoughts,
Isabel
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"I have a chronic disease. Meaning I have failed." What kind of crude rhetoric provocation is this?