The Witch is Dead

Prevailing wisdom says that complicated thoughts and feelings have no place at the office.  Executives and those especially in leadership positions have two emotions to choose from:  indifference and cheerful.  They must portray omnipotence at any and all situations without showing the slightest bit of need, whether it be need for support, need for input, or need for problem-solving.  And God forbid, if there are any strong negative feelings; they are not allowed to express them because it will make them feel “human” rather than super kind. 

In my people-strategy practice, I have always been an advocate of following your three eyes: your mind’s eye, your heart’s eye and your inner eye.  Most people may quickly relate to the mind as the center of logic or thoughts and the heart as the center or emotions or feelings, but not necessarily relate to the inner eye.  This is what I refer to as one’s intuition.  Either based on experience, genetics or what I like to believe, as one’s value-set, intuition is a very credible source for decision-making and conflict-resolution and people matters in general.  However can it be the only source?  Where do intuitions get life from? 

Intuitions, or gut feelings, are sudden, strong judgments whose origin we can't immediately explain (Carlin Flora, 2007). Although they seem to emerge from an obscure inner force, they actually begin with a perception of something outside—a facial expression, a tone of voice, a visual inconsistency so fleeting you're not even aware you noticed. Think of them as rapid cognition or condensed reasoning that takes advantage of the brain's built-in shortcuts. This concept is reinforced in a Los Angeles Times article Brain’s Use of Shortcuts Can Be a Route to Bias: Perception: The Mind Relies on Stereotypes to Make Fast Decisions. But in Hiring that Can Lead to Discrimination.

Encased in certainty, intuitions compel us to act in specific ways. While endless reasoning in the absence of guiding intuitions is unproductive, it is best used as the first step in solving a problem or deciding what to do. The more experience you have in a particular domain, the more reliable your intuitions, because they arise out of the richest array of collected patterns of experience. But even in your area of expertise, it's wisest to test out your hunches—you could easily have latched on to the wrong detail and pulled up the wrong web of associations in your brain.  Is it any wonder that the story of Wizard of Oz incorporated courage, heart, brain, and home as a team taking on the Witch of the West? 

We regularly see executives with recurring emotional challenges at work—anxiety about priorities, jealousy of others’ success, fear of rejection, distress over perceived slights—who have devised techniques to “fix” them: positive affirmations, prioritized to-do lists, immersion in certain tasks. But when we ask how long the challenges have persisted, the answer might be 10 years, 20 years, or since childhood.

Clearly, those techniques don’t work—in fact, ample research shows that attempting to minimize or ignore thoughts and emotions serves only to amplify them (Frank Bond, 2012). Effective leaders don’t buy into or try to suppress their inner experiences. Instead they approach them in a mindful, values-driven, and productive way—developing what we call Congruency Response at Center for Work Life.  Highly correlational to the components of emotional intelligence, Congruency Response, is the activity one partakes in to make sure decisions and emotional responses don’t get processed by short-cut responses that are based on the data received from each of the three sources of emotion, logic, and intuition, but rather by all three. 

In our complex, fast-changing knowledge economy, this ability to manage one’s thoughts and feelings is essential to business success. Numerous studies, from the University of London professor Frank Bond and others, show that emotional agility can help people alleviate stress, reduce errors, become more innovative, and improve job performance. 

Take the case of a young female executive who having worked at corporate for years had a family and realized she was experiencing tremendous guilt when leaving them behind to go to work.  Vice versa when with her family, she felt guilty, she wasn’t “accomplishing” what she could or needed to.  For years she had tried quieting the guilt, but it was like a yoyo effect.  The more she tried to be satisfied, the less she actually was. 

On the other hand, take the case of a male executive who in spite of very high level of intelligence and proficiency at his leadership position, had constant battle with conflict and reacted through anger.  He had gone to anger management classes only to feel he had become unempathetic and stoic. 

Conclusion:  control is not necessarily the solution.  Acceptance on the other hand is what unlocks the door and opens the path to freedom and fulfillment.  Both cases mentioned above, where going with the “gut feeling” when in reality, their gut feeling was only communicating its primary response which was dislike.  The next step needed to be the inner experience of courage to accept, rather than control.  Values and principles tame the gut feeling and provide the ultimate unbiased decision, whereas the mind alone, aims to control.    

In our highly individualistic society, where power and accomplishment are symbols of success, it is difficult to believe that lack of control can sometimes be a savior.  Our gut may be uncomfortable with someone, or some circumstance, however accepting only that response, and going with it, could be like the predicament of Hansel and Gretel picking at the Witch’s Gingerbread house. It's time to declare an end to the battle between gut and mind—and to the belief that intuitions are Para psychological fluff. Better to explore how the internalized experiences from which gut feelings arise, should interact with the deliberate calculations of the conscious mind and the heart.