Head or Gut?

Why we are not FEARLESS and hold back in meetings…

About a year or so ago I addressed all my colleagues @Klick (about 600 folks) at our Town Hall on the topic of being #fearless. All too often talks like this resonate with lots of people and we enjoy a burst of energy at the time, but I wanted to make sure the talk had some lasting power…so at the end of the talk I invited anyone in the room to connect with me for some one-on-one coaching to talk practically about how they could bring the idea of fearlessness into their day-to-day

I’m happy to say that I got about 60 people come through my office over the following weeks and individually we talked about lots of ways in which they could operate in this space we were calling fearless. Interestingly, we were circling around the idea of being brave or overcoming fears…not really being fearless…but it’s a good word to sum up the idea and makes for a good hashtag … so it stuck.

In the views of the people I was working with the ability to act fearlessly took many, many forms but there is a pattern I see when I look back on the 60 or so sessions. It can summed up simply as “speaking up”. Not public speaking or rising up against something….simply speaking up in meetings. It’s amazing how at the abstract level the notion of fearlessness can seem like a really big thing and create some palpable anxiety but when you boil it down to something you can really clearly articulate; there is anguish that comes from “I should say something” in tension with “I should have said something” is pretty defining in many of the people I spoke with .

I work with super smart people across a ton of crafts (technology, creative, medical, strategy, analytics to name a few) and they come from myriad backgrounds (culturally, educationally, work experience) and so there’s a complex framework of filters they each apply as they consider whether they should speak I’ll or not. Unpacking those filters would take forever and is a form of calculus that no one should go through when trying to act on the urge to speak up.

So I looked for a simple exercise to go through and tested it on myself over the next week.

The contributing factors as to why people don’t speak up is all over the place but I can boil it down to a pretty simple construct:

Your Gut is telling you to jump in

and

Your Head is telling you not to

I can confidently say that my gut reflected my instincts and my head was my ego telling me that I will look bad if I do this.

I can see why this is a struggle for many of the people I work with. There are some pretty clear patterns when you start to lump people together in big groups.

Firstly, there’s a belief that those that talk more in meetings have more power and more respect and that’s generally aligned with extroverts. Those that are quieter and more reserved are introverts have less power. I don’t believe this to be true but, regardless of a company’s culture I think this belief follows undeniable trend-lines. For that reason, I wanted to work with folks at Klick to remedy the symptom rather than get to root cause of why they are who they are (I’m not a trained professional when it comes to these things, I just learned to go with my gut and ignore that little voice in my head over the years).

So we “gamified” it. Take a piece of paper into every meeting with you. At the top of that of that paper write down a simple goal like:

Speak meaningfully 3 times in this meeting.

• Every time the voice in your head wins — mark it down
• Every time your gut wins and you speak up — mark it down
• When you start hitting your goal — raise the goal.

When I first suggested to try this one. Most of the super smart people that heard this said, “this feels like I’ll just be bullshitting” and talking for no reason. And then I’d point out the word meaningfully in the goal. As a result of that word you’d have to actively listen rather than simply wait your turn to deliver an out-of-context message.

Also, you can’t outsource this to someone else like, “hey can you ask me to chime in 3 times in this meeting?” That won’t work, it means that you’re not taking the initiative and also, you may have nothing to say which has you go backwards.

Like a report card, commit to bringing all your crumply pieces of paper to someone else at the end of the week to review how you did.

• The fact that you write it down will make it real.
• The fact that you have to listen will change your stance in a meeting.
• The fact that you do it will make it less fearful and you’ll get more comfortable each time.

I’d be curious if anyone reading this would be willing to try this and circle back with comments in a week or so. Or share the reasons why you don’t speak up in meetings (what the little voice in your head says).

I’ll reserve the results from my internal Klick experiment until the next time….