How you’d explain it to grandma at Thanksgiving dinner
The premise is that as our world becomes more complex, fast-changing, and unpredictable, leaders are often led astray when they try to just follow their instincts. After studying thousands of hours of conversations with organizations, Garvey Berger found that leaders often fell victim to five different cognitive and emotional reflexes, or what she calls “mindtraps” (see below).
Her goal in this book was to shine a light on these mindtraps, and also to offer simple ideas and practices for escaping these traps. Simply by taking note of when these reflexes kick in, engaging in basic habits, and asking ourselves short questions, we can all become more effective leaders.
If you do one thing based on this read . . .
When you find yourself facing a leadership challenge, take a pause and ask yourself, “Which mindtrap am I in danger of falling into?” Noticing is the first step to finding your way out of the trap.
“Compassion for others helps us connect to them without judgment and with open, curious kindness. Compassion for ourselves does the same thing - only it connects us to ourselves with open, curious kindness. This creates the conditions for us to learn from the mistakes we inevitably make rather than feel shame about them.”
Three Clear Takeaways
1. Know your mindtraps. Our brains have created cognitive and emotional “shortcuts” that don’t serve us as well as they used to. When the world was simpler, less connected, and more predictable, these shortcuts were valuable. But today’s world is anything but simple and predictable. As a result, our shortcuts have turned into the following five mindtraps:
Simple Stories - We try to create narratives and make sense of the data we receive, even if that data is incomplete. We form an opinion of others quickly, and then select data that supports the opinion we have created.
Rightness - We are trapped by a need to be right. The feeling of being certain (which is an emotion, and not actually linked to whether we are actually right) prevents us from being open and curious and looking for information that may prove we are wrong.
Agreement - We have been trained to believe that agreeability is a virtue, and have an aversion to disagreements in the workplace. As a result, we tend to either compromise or polarize, and neither one tends to lead to the best possible outcome.
Control - We believe that being in control of outcomes is the key to our happiness and success, even when efforts at control are futile; when things seem out of control, we either blame ourselves for doing it wrong or others who must have the “real power.”
Ego - We are convinced that despite the amount of change and growth that we have already experienced, we are done growing and changing. We so badly want to protect the person that we have been (our ego), that we close ourselves off to new possibilities.
2. Ask yourself questions to escape the mindtraps. This book was a fantastic reminder of the power of simple questions (a firm belief for coaches!). For each of these mindtraps, you can ask yourself simple questions to break out of the reflex and consider other perspectives. For example, when you notice that you are trapped by the need to be right, you can ask yourself “What do I believe, and how might I be wrong?” When you are wondering whether to confront an individual and open the door to disagreement, you might ask yourself “Could this conflict serve to deepen a relationship?”
3. Use mindfulness to escape these mindtraps. In case you haven’t already read enough about the power of mindfulness, here is another reminder. Garvey Berger encourages us to connect with our purpose, our bodies, and our emotions, as well as to have compassion for ourselves and others, to help us build the ladder we need to climb out of the traps. These connections can be created through mindfulness practices.