DESCRIPTION

Ben is 47 years old. He is the owner of an independent electronics store in a major Bay Area mall. He is married, with three children—all teens. They are all bright, but two are doing badly in school. One child is described as being a super achiever.

Ben’s wife of 22 years has historically worked in the store. In the last two years, her drinking has increased, he believes. She seems angry all the time, but she will not talk about why. He is frightened. His situation feels out of control. Ben works long hours, including weekends. He goes home in the evening after work and cooks dinner for himself, then puts the remainder up for his family for the next evening. He wakes up in the morning, fixes breakfast and lunch for his children, and then goes to work. He expects that his wife will come in by 9:00AM when the store opens.

Ben recalled that when he met his wife in college, she had very good grades and was working two jobs to put her self through school. She helped him start the store about 15 years ago, working with him side-by-side, until the present. "She doesn’t seem to enjoy the business now." His memory is that in the last ten years or so, "She has become more resentful toward me for some reason.” He has asked her about it, but, “She doesn’t really say there is anything wrong.” His response has been to work harder, believing that “If I was a better provider, then she and the kids would be happier and appreciate me more.”

FEEDBACK REPORT

Dear Ben;

YOUR PRESENTING WHY

Ben, the most important "why" question was: “Why don’t I ever feel like people care about all my hard work?” You added, “I work my butt off at home and at work and everyone just seems to expect it. It all falls on me. I don’t get it. I enjoy working, but I feel so unhappy.”

INFORMATION FROM THE ASSESSMENT DEVICES

On the Personal BluePrint assessment device, your scores were generally within the norms of the average adult, but three stood out. 1st, you don’t allow yourself to be very dependent on other people. 2nd, you don’t allow yourself to be very vulnerable to other people. 3rd, you can be quite harsh in how you evaluate your own and others’ behavior in relationships and performance. So, you typically get along with other people, but in a somewhat distant and controlled way. Given your inadvertent distance and harsh evaluation of others, what often occurs is that others stop putting forth real effort. Their experience is often, “Why try? I’ll just be told I’m wrong.” As we discussed, I think this is what’s happened with your wife, to some extent. Please be more supportive of her efforts.

You find it difficult to ask other people for help or to ask other people to help you. Without realizing it, you are asking for more work and are setting up the situation where you will be hurt or let down. How? People cannot read your mind regarding what you need. You are very adept at intuiting what others need in terms of selling them a product. You do that so effectively, I think you expect that others can read your needs as well.

When we talked about your successes, you said that underlying what you believe to be a laid back approach is a good bit of competitive feeling. You tend to see situations internally as win or lose. Losing really does not feel good to you. You ward off that feeling of “I’m about to lose,” by taking charge and pushing yourself to win.

Everyone has a cognitive map they use in order to understand their world and get along in the world. Your map includes a goodly number of “shoulds” and “oughts”; that is, I “should” act this way and if I do, I can expect “that” will occur. Unfortunately, Ben, the world does what the world does, and most often does not do what you or I believe it “should” or “ought” to do. The outcome is that you suffer more frustration than is necessary. In a similar way, you can be perfectionistic. For you, there is always a right and a wrong way. You are following your rules, but others don’t seem to be. So what you expect to occur too often doesn’t occur.

This frustration with imperfection leads you to be quite harsh in how you evaluate yourself and others. You use this to push yourself to be successful. But, what also occurs is that you undercut your belief in yourself. How? You seem to believe that failure occurs when you do not live up to your expectations. This occurs daily to you. Ben, my belief is that failure only occurs when people give up on themselves, not when they do not meet their expectations. You will never give up on yourself, so you will never fail. Recall the exercise we did around evaluating yourself more realistically, and how it calmed your inside (or your insides). Please practice that daily.

Your harsh evaluation of others, when they don’t live up to your expectations, pushes others away and, over the long haul, undercuts their belief in themselves. As we discussed, when you criticize, in your mind, you are just trying to be helpful. But others may not experience it that way. Further, others are unlikely to acknowledge you if you do not acknowledge them.

The Conflict Style Inventory indicated that while you are excellent in solving technical and content problems at work, you are less effective in solving problems when you are personally involved and feeling vulnerable.

Your Self Pictures were great. (There was one stick figure of a man behind an ice cream counter, with seemingly hundreds of people lining up for cones, and on another sheet of paper, a stick figure of the same man having no ice cream left for himself.) The pictures show a person working diligently at a task that brought pleasure to others, with nothing left for himself at the end. Ben, do you ask for what you personally need from others often enough?

YOUR PERSONAL BLUEPRINT

The pattern of your Personal BluePrint is: I do not feel that people acknowledge me. If I please other people by doing almost everything perfectly, I will win the acknowledgement that I want.

So you are working your hardest to gain the acknowledgement you want, but that is not occurring. You are objectively successful, but your ongoing emotional Self-experience is that there is always something wrong, or not good enough, about you or what you do.

Remember the non-stop criticism you experienced from your Dad. You described him as often looking at you in a way that made you feel like a loser. You internalized that interpersonal experience. So, no matter how well you do, or how much you win, you cannot shake that feeling. It’s your deepest experience of your Self. Until you change that Self-experience, you will inadvertently create situations where you do not get the acknowledgement that you want.

Pushing yourself relentlessly is making you successful monetarily—perhaps a win of sorts, but you still don’t feel like you’re acknowledged. Ben, you will never feel acknowledged until you acknowledge yourself by lightening up on yourself and learning to evaluate yourself realistically. Further, others will have difficulty acknowledging you until you lighten up on them and acknowledge them.

Looking at this in another light, as a way to win, you become responsible for everything. You take on too much work, until you end up losing because others do not have to be responsible. This pattern partly accounts for your experience with your children and some of your employees.

Your children are old enough to cook when you work late. But, they play on their computers and heat up the food you made for them. They don’t help. Plus, two are not pushing themselves in school, given their native intelligence. These two don’t need to be responsible. You’re responsible for them. Your eldest son, however, is similar to you in being an achiever and being overly responsible.

Ben, there is nothing to win, just do your best. You are living and dying in every moment of either “Who won?, “Whose right?, or “Did I fail?” As long as you live in those beliefs, you will hold on to the old emotional experience of not being acknowledged, of loss and sadness, and of resentment.

If you do not mature your Personal BluePrint, Ben, you may wake up one day with a failed marriage and two kids who are still too dependent on you, though they are adults. You will then get your greatest fear: There will be no acknowledgement for all you efforts. People will not be pleased with you, you will have done a lot of things imperfectly, and you didn’t win.

BEGINNING TO MATURE YOUR PERSONAL BLUEPRINT

Ben, trust the part of you that appreciates your successes, and the part that momentarily will get you the feelings of inner calm that you want. Trust the part that says, "I've done enough."

Learn to evaluate yourself and others more realistically. We talked about how abrupt and harsh you can be. Cut way back on all the expectations and learn to accept what is realistically acceptable, without thinking that it “could” always be improved. I’ve included a series of exercises for you to do on a daily basis for six weeks.

Be much more clear in setting boundaries with other people in terms of telling them what they need to do in order to gain your acknowledgement and appreciation. It will also be helpful when you set more boundaries on yourself. Do not take on so much. Do not always put in more time. Make a life for yourself away from the business. You can do this by training your employees better, as we discussed. Also, give people more responsibilities at work. You don’t have to have your finger in each profit center. Set goals, provide training, and stand back.

You and May are having a big conflict. Please talk with her. You told me that you knew she was resentful because you are always second-guessing her and are always so busy when she wants to talk. Act on that knowledge. Telling her that you know you are wrong, when you feel you are wrong, is not losing to her. Love isn’t about winning and losing. Remember, you can be right or you can have a relationship.

To the best of your ability, learn how to be less concerned about acknowledgement from others. Focus on the goals you and May want to achieve, focus on what you both need to do to achieve those goals. Set and stay the steady course. Don’t live and die in the moments of success and disappointment. Acknowledge others’ efforts, and accept their acknowledgement.

If you do those things long enough, you will look around and find out that you are being acknowledged and feel acknowledged.

I wish you the best of luck, and I look forward to continuing to work with you, as we discussed.

Best regards,

Gordon Wolf, Ph.D.

DESCRIPTION

Johanna is a 38-year-old vice-president at a regional bank. Her role in the organization is to manage a department that focuses on corporate and client development. She and her staff work with the bank's largest customers and with potential customers in whom the bank has a strong interest.

Historically, Johanna's performance as an employee has been very good; but now, getting new business is much more difficult. She is not providing clear leadership, and her people seem un-motivated. Her manager must decide whether Johanna should stay in her current capacity. Everyone describes Johanna the same way: When she "shows up," no one is more effective. The trouble occurs when she doesn't show up, which seems to be happening more frequently.

JOB CHALLENGES

Johanna must take charge and lead. Her department must become more productive and close more sales. Unfortunately, that isn't happening, and a crisis is developing. Johanna wants to please potential clients and give them what they want. She doesn't negotiate hard enough and doesn't want her employees to be too "hard-nosed." She seems afraid to think outside the box when problem solving.

Johanna manages three people, none of whom are functioning at peak capacity. She is vague when providing direction to her employees unless the situation is clear. She changes her perspective depending on the last person she talks to. Johanna's passive approach has caused her to miss key meetings, and her lack of follow-through on other projects has stymied her staff; they can't get the decisions they need, and trust her less and less.

ASSESSMENT FINDINGS

I met with Johanna, had her complete several assessment devices, and reviewed the findings with her. For the sake of brevity and because here we are focusing on Johanna, not how the information was obtained, I am using her own words to describe her patterns of behavior:

INTERACTING WITH OTHERS

"I don't think I listen to others as well as I could. People say I don't hear them. I don't think I trust people very well. I'm always suspicious when I don't need to be."

"I think I was the little girl that needed to be taken care of. I wasn't responsible for things; I didn't have to make decisions. Something would happen and I didn't have a lot of control over it so I learned not to take a lot of control. What I did learn was that by being a 'nice' little girl, people wouldn't hurt me. I can now see that people can only have an adult/child relationship with me. It's not enough in either direction."

"At 2:00 p.m. I think, 'If I can just get through to five o'clock.' So, I clean my desk. I look busy. When someone comes in and asks me what I'm doing, I get angry. I say, 'I'm busy as hell. I don't have time.'"

EMOTIONS

"My own disappointment in myself is the food that keeps me going. If I didn't have that, what would I have? If I didn't have that, I'd just have moments of success. That's funny..."

"The fear is locking me in. Some days I'm afraid to do simple things, like pick up the phone and call clients. What I feel most often are disappointment and fear. Fear is motivating; it pushes me to do things. But the disappointment is always there. I feel like I could be doing more, but I don't know exactly what I could be doing, because it's complicated by the fear."

"My emotions are buried under stuff. I try to get by without them. I do such a good job of blocking my feelings that the only time I can feel them is when they're big ones. They have to be very intense. I get pissed, and I can feed off of that. I piss someone off and then feed off of that. I learned in my family that emotions weren't good, so I pushed them down. I'm very successful at that. The way you succeeded in my family was to watch and not react. I learned that you do what you have to do to get through in the moment, and I guess that's what I'm doing with other people. I wonder sometimes if I'm alive or just enduring."

"My mother would say, 'Look at your father. He's acting like a jackass.' Don't be angry. Don't let your anger show. Don't get caught being angry. I'll hide my anger. I'll flatten out my emotional response. You know, I'm not very assertive. To be assertive, you have to deal with your anger. I need to be assertive to live my life."

"I tell myself, 'Just put up with things.' I say that over and over... it seems like twenty times a day. I'm angry about that, but I make other people endure me. I bring it all down to my level, I guess. I do what I have to do to get through. I blame myself a lot. I don't trust other people, I tell myself not to trust them. I manage my anger by suppressing it. I tell myself, 'Don't get angry... It's OK... It doesn't bother you.' I need to get through the lid, not focus on what I say up there (she points to her head). I gotta get it through here." (She points to her heart).

"I memorized the rules. Life is a series of right and wrong statements. I don't feel grounded at all. My husband criticizes me: 'You never seem to know what to do.' My boss always tells me the same thing: 'You never seem to know what to do.' How could I know? One rule says do it this way, another says do it that way."

FANTASY

"I'm in a cloud. Everything is foggy; nothing is fixed. It's like there's no place to touch, no hand to hold. My mind is the only part of me that's alive. My body is just not there. It's like a rag-doll flopping around. My body represents my emotions. I'll cut it off. It's like gravity. I need to stop blaming myself—just let it happen again."

PERCEPTIONS

"I feel like others will take advantage of me. They are taking advantage of me. They're not treating me fairly: at work, at home, when I'm out, people take advantage of me. I have a hard time getting service, even when I go to restaurants. I can't tell you the number of times I've ordered and not gotten it or gotten something different ... four or five times a year. It's the joke in our family. At the office, people say the same thing about me. I can't get it. I think I set it up. I don't speak loudly. There's no tone or inflection. I'm not assertive. I think I'm too wimpy. My feeling is, 'This person isn't respecting me.' It's a safe outlook for my anger."

PERSONAL BLUEPRINT

Based on my assessment of Johanna's inner life, I identified her Personal BluePrint—her innermost sense of herself, the pattern that rules all other attitudes and behaviors—as this:

"My life is to be endured. If you wait long enough, it will change. The immediate circumstances will go away and things will go on. Then it will be OK, people will take care of you." The image is of a little girl who is waiting while life passes by, waiting for someone to come along and make things better.

Remember that Johanna's PBP was created in her experience of how others saw her as she grew up and in the role that she had to take to gain support and affection. Once her PBP was set, subsequent behavioral patterns reinforced that Self-view. She was "trained" to endure, so now she responds to her external environment with behaviors and attitudes that maintain her identity as one who endures.

THE PERSONAL BLUEPRINT'S 6 CORE INTERPERSONAL COMPETENCIES™

TRUSTING WHAT I EXPERIENCE INSIDE OF ME

Johanna is never really sure how she feels, and so she can't trust her feelings and intuitions to let her know when things are going well or when there's a problem. It's safer to wait until someone tells her what to do. Because she's so unsure of herself, it's difficult to give others advice about how they should proceed. She is often angry about "something," but the anger gets displaced on to others who are safe to be angry with. When she doesn't know why she's angry or who she's angry with, she has trouble being assertive. Internally, she feels disconnected. Her experience of herself is that of not being grounded. She does things according to internalized rules: "shoulds" and "oughts." She can't think creatively because the rules don't cover creativity.

ASKING FOR WHAT I WANT

Johanna was taught to not ask for what she wants, so she doesn't. At times, her fears block her from acting. She believes that if she endures, then someone else will take over. She recognizes that she can't get to her anger in a way that will allow her to be assertive.

EVALUATING MYSELF AND OTHERS REALISTICALLY

Johanna sees herself as lacking power and others as having more power. She is unrealistically harsh with herself and frustrated with her constant self-valuation as someone who disappoints and who is powerless. This "self-reinforcing" assessment keeps her from trying different things, while the sense of powerlessness sometimes fills her with fear.

RECOGNIZING CONFLICT AND WORKING TO RESOLVE IT

Johanna doesn't realize that most of her relationships are in some way based on conflict. An experience of unresolved conflict is the normal state inside of her, though, and so it also feels normal on the outside. Thus, she doesn't take charge or do something to change it. Not recognizing and resolving these conflicts allows her to experience and accept the need to "endure."

SETTING REALISTIC BOUNDARIES ON MYSELF AND OTHERS

Johanna is trapped inside of a jail of shoulds, oughts, and rules, so instead of being able to say, "No, I don't want you to do that," or "Yes, I want you to do this," she changes her mind depending on the last person she talked with. She always ends up enduring, not taking charge. She doesn't feel empowered to set meaningful boundaries on others' behavior. First, she was taught that she couldn't. Second, she isn't sure what she really wants. Third, assertiveness requires that one access their feelings of being rightfully upset, and be comfortable with that experience of power and anger.

RECOGNIZING THAT OTHERS ARE THE SAME AS ME, BUT DIFFERENT

Johanna is so self-centered, her behaviors so firmly attached to what she needs, that she can't see what others need from her (decisions, direction). She expects that others want to please her as she wants to please her manager. Without realizing it, she expects others to know what she wants them to do without having to tell them.

APPLYING THE PERSONAL BLUEPRINT TO THE KEY BEHAVIORS OF LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT

As with many people, Johanna began to respond differently when she saw how all the patterns of her life fit together. The common experience is that we are aware of many of them, but we cannot see how they all fit together in a coherent whole. Once people see that there is one pattern that is effectively controlling their lives, and understand that this pattern is a Self-fulfilling prophecy, they can begin to be different. Most people don't want to fail. When they can see so clearly that they are failing and why, they inevitably find it within themselves to do things differently.

In addition to helping Johanna recognize her Personal BluePrint, we also taught her that Management is "Holding people accountable while developing relationships of trust," and that Leadership is "Providing clear direction and making sure that people are psychologically safe." She realized that she wasn't gaining the respect or trust of either her staff or her manager.

Like most people, she found the various descriptions of her behavior, and whether they were goal-directed or self-defeating, clear and non-blaming. Our interpersonal descriptions of management and leadership made sense to her, and she felt confident that she could accomplish our behavior-changing suggestions because they were specific and not abstract. She now understands that psychological safety occurs when situations at work are predictable and equitable.

As part of her management coaching, we helped Johanna focus on the following:

Recognizing that when she heard the words "You need to endure" in her Self-talk, or experienced the feeling of enduring, she needed to act and not be passive

Reading a book on assertiveness vs. practicing being assertive. We coached her through several work-related situations that required that she take charge. We played the employee in these situations. First, we modeled the behavior for her, then helped her by providing prompts, and then let her respond on her own. After the interactions, we talked about our response to her as employees, and worked on ways to improve the interaction. Then we practiced some more until she could act assertively.

Consciously recognizing how many times a day she heard "should" and "ought" in her Self-talk. We asked her to note and catalog the specific shoulds and oughts on her Palm Pilot, to go over them at night and think of how she might respond more spontaneously, then try to implement those ideas the next tim she heard those words.

Taking part in a community program that trains and then provides court-appointed negotiators for couples and individuals in conflict.

Having more meetings with her manager, and getting very clear direction from her manager on where she needed to get to, not how to get there. We asked her to develop written plans and to go over those plans during meetings to gain mid-course corrections. We advised her manager to let Johanna struggle, to not respond to her anxiety by "saving her" as he had been doing without realizing it.

As for the three core behaviors that every manager and leader must master, Johanna was guided in the following ways:

BEING ASSERTIVE

Johanna was not providing a mission, a role, or goal clarity for herself or her staff. There were no written work plans or concrete methods of evaluating performance. We worked with her to conceptualize what she needed to do as a leader and manager in all of those areas. We provided some models of what other managers had developed in similar situations. She produced the written documentation she needed regarding standards, direction, and evaluation, and went over them with her manager first and then her staff. She used the documentation as something external to her, a set of boundaries or statements, of what she wanted from herself and others. That she was doing what her manager wanted gave her additional strength to go on. She worked with her work group to set up rules and timelines that everyone could accept. She told her staff that she wasn't much good at discipline (they faked surprise and a good laugh was had by all), and asked them to help discipline each other when one wasn't meeting the agreements they'd made. We followed up with her to make sure that she was reviewing the work plan and holding the group accountable to their agreements.

MANAGING CONFLICT PRODUCTIVELY

Johanna recognized that when she felt the "need to endure," she was in a conflicted situation and she probably was angry. She learned that this sense of enduring was a "cover" for the feelings of anger she experienced; it was safe to endure but not to be angry. She began to recognize, and then act on, her anger rather than suppress it. She used the work plans as an effective management tool because people were required to do them and they helped the bank achieve its mission. Holding people accountable was no longer "a personal thing where I felt like I was forcing people to do what I wanted" as she had previously experienced. Johanna now expected her employees to hold themselves accountable to agreements they'd made with her and with each other. She used a method we taught her for getting the group to Self-manage, and learned that conflict could be an ally and not a source of befuddlement and confusion.

BEING TRUSTWORTHY

Johanna recognized that she was very Self-centered, but had viewed herself as being very other-centered—everyone's doormat. She recognized that she destroyed other's trust in her by being inconsistent, passive, and letting people get away with things. Others felt that she had favorites, or experienced her as getting too close and then disappearing. They were angry with her. They felt she abandoned them and let them endure situations that she could have fixed. Her manager felt that he must constantly save her and fix things, until it all got to be too much for him.

Johanna used the work plans and held people to their agreements to hold themselves accountable, and, when necessary, she held people accountable directly. She admitted to her staff (without being overly apologetic) that she often ended up enduring things that she didn't want to, and told them that when she felt that way, she just put up with it. Now she wanted to be different, and she wanted feedback on how she was doing.

She told them that she was learning how to respond more directly rather than passively, but that she would sometimes "act too harshly. But bear with me, I'm learning." She also told them to talk to her if they felt as if they were enduring something they didn't feel was appropriate. They did, and after a while she could hear it as a call to action, not a criticism of her. Internally, she began to experience herself doing things much differently. Johanna even caught her manager in the act of helping her when she was struggling, and asked him to let her struggle. Both he and her staff began to respect and trust her.