Leveraging Relationships for Learning & Leveling Up

Thriving in exponential change requires us to develop ourselves at an exponential rate.

One of the most powerful leverage points for anyone intent on shifting one’s own trajectory is by becoming more conscious about our relationships.

Paradigm Shifting Professionals are a category of innovators and changemakers who seem particularly intent on “upping our game” by getting serious about our own development. (We recognize the challenges we’re facing are serious so we can’t afford to play the game of life at the amateur level any longer).

Why Focus on Relationships?

You’re busy! Why bother focusing on relationships? Well, as adrienne maree brown highlights, “Relationships are everything”![1]

Margaret Wheatley refers to relationships as “The basic building blocks of life” and states that it’s a leader’s work to reweave relationships. Relationships are essential to the optimal development of our human potential. Why? Because “everything in the Universe is composed of these ‘bundles of potentiality’ that only manifest their potential in relationship.”[2]

Why We Need to Get Intentional About the Quality of Our Relationships

In the hubbub of our lives, we can lose track of the fact that “everything that we do, as individuals and as groups, involves relationships. These relationships can be with our own ideas, assumptions, and values, with other people, with our job, or with the organization. Every situation is defined by its relationships. Fragile relationships translate into inefficiencies, ineffectiveness, low productivity, and a lack of innovation. Resilient relationships translate into high levels of effectiveness, productivity, and innovation.”[3]

Like fish to water, we’re swimming in relationships, so the quality of them is worth tracking. “When it comes to relationships, we are greatly influenced — whether we like it or not — by those closest to us. It affects our way of thinking, our self-esteem, and our decisions.”[4]

Patterns of Relating

I’m fascinated by two primary patterns humans organize ourselves around. I’ve heard different names for them including:

• Power-Over/Power-With (Mary Parker Follet)
• Domination/Partnership (Riane Eisler)
• Retribution/Restoration (Peter Block)
• The Values of Enterprise/The Values of Belonging (Carol Lee Flinders)
• A World that Works for Some/A World that Works for All (Shariff Abdullah)
• Coercive/Chaordic (Dee Hock)

I’m playing for a world where all needs matter, and believe we’re in the midst of a paradigm shift towards this way of being. I don’t think this shift is happening because humans have decided it’s the ethical way to live. Rather, the top-down regulatory structures and frameworks used to control society are already starting to break down as we enter the disruption of exponential change. “We will actually need to re-architect every single structure we have in society today.”[5] Success, I believe, will come to those who develop skills and adopt structures that support more participatory, inclusive, and power-with ways of being as we are already discovering that THIS is what’s most effective in the complex conditions we’re navigating.

Given this possibility, let’s explore what power-with relationships look like. Two key features worth tracking are reciprocity and repair.

1. Reciprocity: The Exchange of Energy

Exchange is an organizing force worth tracking, as “a dynamic balance of giving and receiving is required in systems.”[6] In the paradigm of power-over/power-under, extraction (taking more value that you’re giving) is common. In contrast, the power-with paradigm elevates the importance of gratitude and reciprocity for the relationships which sustain us.[7]

In the book, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, Adam Grant unpacks different reciprocity styles and links the act of giving to success. He identifies takers (who try to get a lot and contribute little), givers (who enjoy the act of contributing and give generously) and matchers (who keep score of exchanges, so things stay even).

On the ladder of success, where do you think each type of personality lands? It turns out givers are overrepresented on the bottom of the ladder, as they can give to the point of depletion. Yet, they’re also overrepresented at the top.

What’s the difference between the givers at the bottom and the ones at the top? The giver’s at the top of the ladder are more discerning about who they give to and how they give (they look for ways to give that are low cost/high benefit; “Win-Win”).

Takes are costly to a system and the people in it! Looking to improve the culture in your group? Grant shares that it’s not about bringing in the givers, as much as it is about weeding out the takers. Why? Because “the negative impact of a taker on a culture is usually double to triple the positive impact of a giver.” If you screen out the takers, “you’ll be left with givers and matchers. The givers will be generous because they don’t have to worry about the consequences, and the beauty of the matchers is they follow the norm.”[8]

Try this: After each interaction with the people in your life, pause to notice how you feel. You may start to notice that there are relationships that infuse you with energy and ones that leave you depleted.

Do this “audit” once or twice and you’ll notice incidents. Make this a regular habit and you’ll start to see patterns. Pay attention to these patterns! They’ll help you discern the health of your relationships, which actually tells you about your health within the relationship. “The health of our relationships makes all the difference in how healthy we are, overall. Several theories abound as to how interpersonal connections alter not just our emotional wellbeing but also our physical health.”[9]

2. Repair: Mending Stronger in the Broken Places

Although many of us were raised on fairy tales which promised a ‘happily ever after,’ the reality is “all relationships are in a process of harmony, disharmony and repair… of closeness, disruption, and a return to closeness. This can play out 30 times in one dinner conversation, or over the course of three decades.”[10]

Although this is a natural rhythm of relationships, those of us who’ve been educated and socialized in the power-over paradigm likely have little experience with true repair. Why?

True repair requires both parties to acknowledge, track, and reflect on their internal state as well as their influence on the other. It requires both parties to take accountability for their behavior and be willing to change (learn how to be more considerate of each other going forward).

Why is true repair so challenging? Shame has been weaponized to coerce our obedience, especially when we were children. We defend against intimations that we’re not doing something “right” or are actually harming another, as this can trigger alarm around safety. Why?

When we’re young, shame threatened our ability to belong (ie, time-outs, being sent to room, missing out on activities). As children, we’re dependent on our tribe to care for us, so threats to our capacity to belong are often experienced as threats to our very survival. PANIC! This is why hearing from another that we did something wrong can trip us into a vicious spiral of shame. (Our brain screams, “Life or Death! Defend!” Obviously, this shame spiral can feel excruciating and would be something we’d want to avoid.

In the power-over paradigm, the powerful can bypass this reaction by not allowing any space for conflict (or making it so painful that the people around us would avoid conflict with us at all costs). Therefore, when relationships hit the disharmony phase in power-over types of relationships, rather than repair, people frequently resort to a variety of strategies including:

Disregarding/Dismissing Strategies

• Having a big reaction (emotional vomiting on others, which takes the edge off of my inner turmoil) and not cleaning up the mess I made afterwards.
• Being ignorantly blissful of my impact on those around me
• Being defensive (rather than take in feedback, I express outrage and feel insulted)
• Insisting my point of view is “right”/Dismissing anything that conflicts with my version of reality
• Stonewalling. Withdrawing/Detaching

Avoiding and Minimizing Strategies

• Sweeping things under the rug or sticking my head in the sand because I’m afraid of rocking the boat
• Tolerating, tolerating, tolerating…and then exploding when I can’t tolerate it any more
• Withdrawing. The silent treatment
• Militant optimism (Toeing the party line, “All is well here. There are no problems.”)

Submission/Fawning Strategies

• Tiptoeing around the relationship/Walking on eggshells
• Investing my energy to keep the other happy to avoid their wrath.
• Giving up on what matters to me (not worth the fight!).
• Giving in. Going along to get along
• Talking myself out of my perceptions and continuously giving the benefit of the doubt to the other person more than to the parts of me that are fed up

If some of these feel familiar to you, you’re not alone. I think I’ve used them all at some point. I hope you feel me holding these observations with compassion and not blame or shame. There are good reasons why we use these strategies. Yet there are also costs to them. I think many of us know this at some level, but are not yet clear on alternatives.

So what does repair look like?

To be honest I’ve only gotten glimpses of it but it seems truly powerful and magical when I’ve witnessed it.

The people I’ve seen who are capable of true repair are:

• Committed to being the best version of themselves and regularly do the practices that enable them to stay present (aware of their inner state and what is happening around them)
• Deep into their healing journeys (they are familiar with their woundedness and their habits of self-protection)
• Self-aware, self-reflective, and self-responsible (they hold a standard of expectation for themselves in how they show up)
• Are able to self-regulate (most of them are intentionally working with their vagus nerve and have strategies for releasing tension and staying present when triggered)
• Are able to witness themselves (they’ve begun to replace the voice of the inner critic with a more compassionate self-witness).

When disharmony arises, these people tend to it early and compassionately. That feels key because by doing this, there is a lot less “charge.”

Rather than blaming, the disharmony is held in the space between them (“something seems off” or “we seem to be missing each other”) or taken on oneself (“I’m noticing I’m feeling activated. I’m going to take a few breaths.”)

There is a next level, I’ve seen some people capable of entering into … a mutual process of unraveling the knot of entanglements, “claiming” what is theirs (“I know I’m sensitive about that” and “I know I can do that when I feel ____. I’m working on this but I still do it, even though I don’t want to.”).

Rather than argue over whose reality is correct, they co-construct a reality that is spacious enough to hold both of their realities.

These exchanges are vulnerable and brave and tender. I’ve felt awe. Why?

Partially because relational repair is so uncommon. It’s like watching an olympic athlete capable of executing moves most of us cannot. But it’s more than that. It seems truly sacred. Time feels slower and ripe with potential. The space feels different. The distance between people seems shorter, clearer, and softer. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to witnessing the process of emergence and healing. Not fixing (outside in) but healing (a force emanating from the space between), a capacity within that is able to weave the broken places of itself back into a stronger whole.

People walk away from the moment feeling closer to themselves, to the other person, to the relationship that holds them both, and perhaps even to the Divine (feeling a Presence of something larger than themselves helping them do things they’ve never been able to do before).

(Check out this short video on Work, Relationships & Repair.)

Leveraging Relationships to Level Up

Navigating disruption and thriving in the new conditions of exponential change require us to develop ourselves at an exponential rate. There are no schools you can attend for this. But there are people! And if it’s true that we are the average of the five people [we] spend the most time with, it’s important that we choose carefully!

I’m choosing the people who are doing the work necessary to lead themselves as I think this is the superpower for thriving amidst disruption. Why do I believe this?

Because I’m fascinated by the principles that help entities (individuals and organizations) become capable of adapting along with a rapidly changing environment without top-down and outside-in mandates and plans to do so.

Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, offers so many essential insights around cultivating the conditions for this superpower to emerge. I find his words on leadership deeply inspiring:

“The first and paramount responsibility of anyone who purports to manage is to manage self: one’s own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts. It is a complex, unending, incredibly difficult, oft-shunned task. We spend little time and rarely excel at management of self precisely because it is so much more difficult than prescribing and controlling the behavior of others.

However, without management of self no one is fit for authority no matter how much they acquire, for the more authority they acquire the more dangerous they become. It is the management of self that should occupy 50 percent of our time and the best of our ability. And when we do that, the ethical, moral and spiritual elements of management are inescapable.” ~Dee Hock, The Art of Chaordic Leadership

Thriving in VUCA

What’s my advice for people who want to thrive in VUCA? Find the people who are dedicating the time and space in their lives to regularly and deliberately engaging in practices that help them learn their interior conditions (what Otto Scharmer has referred to as “The Blindspot of Leadership.”)

Few of us are capable of developing these “new world” capacities alone. We need a community. BUT, we need to be selective about the communities we choose!

“Which communities we choose to learn in and from, will shape the
connections that we form with the environment, and in general,
the kind of learning that occurs within.” ~Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard, PhD

To me, the best place to learn right now is in the company of a small group of people who are intent on doing the inner work that significantly shifts their outer work. I think you will find it rejuvenating (you might experience a whole new possibility for what relationships can be).

You may also discover that it’s one of the quickest, most enjoyable, and effortless ways to grow your own capacities. I’m not saying it will be easy. (You’ll know you’re working on the right stuff if it feels “light” but “scary”.) What I am saying is that when we come back into integrity with our higher selves and invite in emergence, our efforts seem more enjoyable and effortless![11]

[1] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

[2] Margaret Wheatley, Relationships: “The Basic Building Blocks of Life”

[3] Christine Oliver, Complexity, Relationships and Strange Loops: Reflexive Practice Guide)

[4] Aimee Groth, You’re The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With, Business Insider

[5] Salim Ismail Exponential Organizations

[6] John Whittington, Systemic Coaching & Constellations: The principles, practices and application for individuals, teams and groups.

[7] Few people speak to this more beautifully that Robin Wall Kimmerer (check out The Serviceberry and Braiding Sweetgrass!)

[8] Adam Grant, Are You a Giver or a Taker?

[9] Katherine Schreiber, How Relationships Regulate Our Nervous System

[10] Terry Real, Relational Life Therapy training

[11] Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze, Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale