Survive Lockdowns: Unlearn your Hidden Business, Career and Life Asymmetries
Co-holding Emotions, Breaking Asymmetries, Becoming Anti-fragile & Surviving Lockdowns.
Hidden Asymmetries and Wise approach to break them
Firstly, today is Ugadi, a new year for many Indians, especially in Karnataka, Andhra, Telangana, Maharashtra and elsewhere in INDIA. Wish all of you a happy new year. Secondly, today is the start of the 21-day period of Covid-19 lockdown in India (the biggest and longest social shutdown in any history, ever). Again, I wish all of us can successfully navigate these lockdowns and emerge out successfully.
With Corona and COVID-19, we are living through a Black Swan event, as described by Naseem Taleb. All of Taleb’s work is about “hidden asymmetries”. In each of his 4 books, he highlights how we create hidden asymmetries in our minds, with our thoughts, our emotions, our preferences, our biased-behaviors. And in his Black Swan, book in the chapter titled “learning from mother nature, the oldest and wisest”, he actually writes about the risk of an acute virus spreading as a pandemic.
But what is more important, is his cry to understand from the oldest and the wisest. Indian society is of course, one of the oldest and the wisest. (No, I have not created my own asymmetry by stating this :)). Breaking many kinds of asymmetries is what INDIAN culture and rituals are about (YES, Ugadi including). They have proposed breaking our asymmetries by co-holding most dual-polarities, for e.g. like
- Sukha-Dukha (Joy-Grief)
- Novu-Nalikvu (Pain-Pleasure)
- Shubha-Labha (Wellbeing-Profit)
- Sihi-Kahi (Sweet-Bitter) with Bevu-Bella(Neem-Jaggery)…
Let me explain, Ugadi is not just a festival, its actually an instituted ritual, a day to remind ourselves to learn the importance of co-holding with Neem(Bevu — which is bitter) AND Jaggery(Bella — which is sweet), the dual polarities or polar-opposites, that define every-day life.
As Taleb also says, any asymmetry (hidden or otherwise) which we create, will create fragility. Hence he wrote the book Anti-fragile also. Indian yogic and vedic cultures, have always practiced breaking asymmetry and maintaining symmetry, by giving importance to equanimity, arda-narishwara (masculine-and-feminine simultaneity) or via the most well known, Advaita.
Asymmetry staring at the entire world starkly today — Anything DOWN is bad, UP is celebrated.
The asymmetry staring us starkly in our face today, is the importance that we give to Uptime, on things that we wish to keep Running! Running our businesses, running our lives, running everything… and hence we have undervalued anything DOWN!! Slowdown, Lockdown, Clampdown, Shutdown, anything down itself is a taboo. Today, with Corona however, we are forced by a lockdown, we all need to PAUSE and break the asymmetry, of over-dependence on running, which we have created knowingly or unknowingly. Any asymmetry, frankly create distinct sweet-spots and blind-spots, and hence leaves us fragile. I will limit this essay to speaking specifically about sweetspots and blindspots, we create in Businesses, and hence the fragility of businesses, you can extrapolate many of these to your career or even LIFE.
Fragility of Running Businesses
Yes, what most businesspersons know, is how to RUN a business. Uptime is deemed as Business-critical, hence its the business sweetspot. Down-time in Business, has been deemed, a bigger crime than other societal down-times. In fact, business people take pride in having six-sigma level uptimes. However, downtimes can also mean just a Recess. Recess means a period of time when the proceedings of any entity (business, initiative, program, movie, etc) is temporarily suspended. But unfortunately recess today is only understood as Recession, the economic one. Corporate Houses, Enterprises and Business Institutions, mostly think of it as Business Continuity Planning and Disaster recovery, which is largely, anyway a secondary intellectual exercise. However, what is significant and understated is, this kind of economic conditioning that has been institutionalized in each of us, impacts us not just intellectually, but leaves each one of us, emotionally scarred, hence we are panicky, stressed, desperate and anxious about the future. We suddenly feel the world is coming to an end, especially when we are asked to STOP like in lockdowns or clampdowns. This kind of asymmetry between running/stopping, UP-v/s-DOWN, has left us fragile, especially emotionally fragile. What are the reasons behind such emotional fragility?
Holding Emotions v/s Giving and Receiving emotions.
People are emotionally familiar with Giving and Receiving, but are unfamiliar with Holding emotions. Holding our own frustrations, our own anger, our own sorrow, and even our own love, is unfamiliar territory. We are not trained to understand our emotions, let alone be trained to hold them.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” ~Scott Fitzgerald
We hence also find it very difficult, to hold space for others too, because it’s largely about emotional holding. What a lockdown means is we need to hold our emotional state, both for ourselves and for others, and bounce back with the same emotional intensity, when work restarts. However, for businesses/startups there are many challenges, in these unprecedented times, like,
- Old Business models are now immediately obsolete: They are no longer valid. Even successful business models that worked for 4–5 years, and even as recently as 30 days ago, don’t work anymore. So, new business models need to be worked out. Pretty emotionally draining.
- Customer Journeys and Mindsets: All assumptions you had about your Customers are now dead. New assumptions have to be posited and tested. Demanding more emotional investment.
- Runway: Is it a 3-month, 12-month or 3-year shutdown? Who knows? Preparing to Survive, means building emotional stamina.
- Survive to Thrive: You need to first Survive to Thrive. What are your Survival-strategies? Dealing only with Survival, saps your emotional aspirations.
Holding emotions is about conserving all such emotional energy. How do you create more emotional investment, build emotional stamina and stop emotional drainage in testing times? Most importantly, how do you consciously do it? Are there any deliberate practices?
Further Exploration — Co-holding Emotions, Breaking Asymmetries, Becoming Anti-fragile & Surviving Lockdowns.
Unlocking Emotional Intelligence
Energy for any activity (or action) is an outcome of co-holding emotional tensions which appear as polar opposites. Yes, just like in Physics, where a battery has two poles — +ve and -ve, and potential Difference between these poles determines voltage or capacity. This is exactly how our emotions operate too. Holding the duality between running and stopping, sweet and bitter, traumatic and emphatic, etc is what gives energy to act. Not a unidimensional asymmetric way. Asymmetry always leads to fragility. Symmetry in our ability to co-hold emotions, is what makes us anti-fragile and provides enduring energy to unlearn and relearn. This is very well explained by authors Ecker, Ticic and Hulley in their book Unlocking the Emotional Brain.
Tight-rope walk of co-holding dualities
Our business, career and even life, is a tight rope walk of co-holding these dualities. Between running a business, and shutting down is the ability to PAUSE. A recess is really about Pausing, Adjourning or Taking a Long-break, its not about Recession. Have you explored with pausing or adjourning your business? Ability to hold your desires/emotions has scientifically been proven to ensure long term success, via the famous Marsh Mellow Test or Delayed Gratification test. Recess, is your path to Success. Like Taleb said, become anti-fragile, by breaking your asymmetries. It’s not a fluke that INDIAN culture and most rituals, like celebration of Ugadi, have universally addressed breaking asymmetries, for thousands of years, too.
How do I deliberately unlearn my asymmetries?
Maker’s Practice is a Deliberate set of Practices for exploring how to unlearn asymmetries to conserve and co-hold your emotional energies for Customer Success & Business success. We at Maker’s Practice and I personally, have learnt from our Indian wisdom and traditions, and also co-hold the scientific reasoning provided by experts like Taleb and Ecker. Whether its Straddling the dual-worlds of Product/Customer as written here before, whether its co-holding a Beginner’s mind and Expert’s mind, co-holding Uptime-for-Success AND Shutdown-for-Recess, and ultimately co-holding Lockdowns-for-Surviving AND Running-for-Thriving, we are here to help.
Don’t wait, be a fellow at Maker’s Practice. Leave a comment, write an email (manjunath at catalystor dot com) or call us.
