Near the end of an Arbinger training event with employees of a large manufacturing company, the facilitator explained that one person changing to an outward mindset doesn’t make others respond in kind; others still choose their own mindsets.
One of the participants spoke up. “I understand that,” she said, “but I often respond differently to people that I know care about me; I just do. They don’t make me respond differently, but it’s almost like I can’t help it. Something about their concern for me invites me to start thinking more carefully about them.” Heads nodded around the room.
“That’s my experience too,” said another. “For me, it’s surprising how often mindset change in one person does end up inviting change in others.”
A man sitting in the back of the room strenuously ob jected. “I don’t agree with that at all,” he argued, his voice rising. “I’m outward mindset almost all the time, but it doesn’t seem to matter!” The veins in his neck bulged as he said this, and some participants chuckled to themselves at the apparent irony in his response.
At this point, a woman in the back of the room raised her hand. She hadn’t spoken in the group until this moment. “Can I tell you a story?” she asked.
“Certainly, please,” the facilitator responded.
She began:
Many years ago, my brother committed a terrible crime that landed my family on the front page of the newspapers for months. The ordeal destroyed our reputation and ripped at the fabric of our family. There is no way that I can describe the confusion and pain we all felt; it devastated us. One by one we moved away from the area to get out from beneath the shame we felt and to try to build new lives. As the years went on, we would periodically gather for a few days to keep the family connected, but the new family fabric we were fashioning was knit partly through the collective act of exorcising our brother from our family identity.
After a few decades, this older brother was finally released from prison. It had been almost long enough for us to completely expunge him from our consciousness. Yet suddenly he was back. Soon thereafter, we happened to have a family gathering scheduled, and he showed up. We made small talk with him, but there was strain and discomfort in every word. How could there not have been? Here was the guy we still felt had ruined us.
After a short pause, she continued.
Sometime during lunch on that first day, my brother slid away. By evening time, we suspected that he would not be returning, and to be honest, we were relieved. We didn’t have to force conversations anymore; we could just relax and enjoy each other. We could go back to being the family we had finally managed to become.
As the evening progressed, however, a realization settled on me. I saw how close we were to losing this brother again—this time maybe forever. And I knew in that moment that I couldn’t allow this to happen. That didn’t mean I no longer had hard feelings or anything; I was as conflicted as the rest of the family. It just meant that I knew I couldn’t just let him go—like I didn’t care about him or something. I resolved in that moment that I would maintain the family’s connection with him by reaching out to him with a letter every month. It was a small thing, but it was something I knew I could do.
That was seven years ago, and I’ve written him every month since. And you know something? I’ve yet to hear back from him.
There was an audible gasp in the room. “No, but that’s okay,” she responded. “Because I’m not doing it for me, I’m doing it for him.”
This story illustrates critical lessons for anyone who wants to sustain an outward mindset. Sometimes having an outward mindset is rather easy. We may be among people who care about each other, and it may seem utterly natural and easy to respond to them with an outward mindset. Our teams at work, for example, may be filled with energetic and helpful individuals. Or we may be fortunate to be in a family filled with kind and generous people. In such cases it is relatively easy to maintain an outward mindset. Why? Because we feel so cared for and considered by those whose mindsets are outward toward us that we feel no need or desire to be defensive toward them. Almost effortlessly we find ourselves naturally showing consideration in return. As Brenda Ueland, whom we quoted in chapter 9, taught, we find ourselves unfolding in the presence of such people. An outward mindset in one person invites the same in others.
Unfortunately, the same principle works as well in reverse. When we interact with someone who is operating with an inward mindset, we may feel that he is failing to consider our views or opinions, and we can see that as an invitation to take offense or withdraw. If we do, we will give back to this person exactly what he is giving to us, and we will become embroiled in an inward-mindset struggle like the credit and sales teams we discussed in chapter 10. Such struggles may last for a minute, for a day, or perhaps even for a lifetime.
Although an inward mindset in one person does not cause others to respond with an inward mindset, it does invite others to respond in kind. The challenge is how to respond with an outward mindset when those we work or live with invite the opposite.
Long before Mark Ballif, whom we wrote about in chapter 1, became a successful executive, he was a young worker in his first postcollege job and was struggling with his boss. He had graduated feeling as if he had a lot to contribute, and he elected to join a young company with a mission he really believed in. One of the first dozen employees at the firm, he was excited to help the organization grow into what he knew it could become.
However, as the days grew into months, and those months expanded into the first two years of his professional career, Mark grew increasingly disenchanted. Two years in, he felt as if he had no more responsibility in the organization than on the day he started—which meant one thing: his boss didn’t think he had any more to offer.
Mark felt held back, overlooked, and unappreciated. Every day he felt victimized—prohibited from exercising his gifts. Frustration grew into anger. The future Mark had envisioned seemed forever out of reach. He started to circulate his résumé.
He was in the middle of planning his exit when his boss’s boss, someone Mark looked to as a mentor, said that he wanted to meet with him. After all those months, Mark finally felt vindicated. He sees how much I’m giving here, Mark thought. He knows how hard it is to work for my boss, so he’s going to step in and make things right. He’s going to console me, tell me I’m doing okay, and then help chart a pathway for me to grow in the company. Mark walked into the meeting with hopeful expectation.
When he sat down, however, his mentor said, “Mark, we need more from you.”
Mark was mortified. This assessment was so different from what he had anticipated that it stunned him into silence. He listened as his mentor tried to open Mark’s eyes to how Mark had been holding back from giving his best in his work.
Mark tried to defend himself in that meeting, but the conversation led him to begin rethinking some of his actions. He went home and couldn’t sleep that night.
As he lay in bed, Mark replayed in his mind many events from the prior couple of years. At first, these memories rekindled his anger. But as he reconsidered what his mentor had said to him, he began to notice truths about his experience that he had previously overlooked. He saw himself avoiding his boss and openly criticizing what she wanted done. He recognized his reluctance to step up and take on new challenges. He saw moping and complaining and withholding and evading.
As the night wore on, Mark began to question the internal narrative about his boss that constantly ran in his mind. If she’s so obviously the villain I’m claiming her to be, he wondered, why do I have to spend so much internal energy trying to convince myself of it? As he thought about this, it occurred to him that the narrative itself affected how he interacted with and treated his boss. What if what I’ve been telling myself isn’t true? he wondered. The question was enough to get him out of bed.
He grabbed a yellow legal pad and drew a line down the center of the page. In the left-hand column, he began listing the ways that he really hadn’t been helpful to his boss—the ways he had mistreated her and set her up for failure and disappointment. His list reached halfway down the page. Then on the right-hand side he began to write the ways that he could help. This list filled multiple pages. With each page turn, he felt a shackle coming off. As he stared at the ideas that had come flooding out of him, Mark realized that the person primarily responsible for holding him back had been himself. The realization freed him. A world of new possibility dawned in his mind.
When Mark returned to work, he began implementing some of the changes he had written. As he did so, he discovered that what his boss’s boss had said to him was true: not only did the organization need more from Mark, he was capable of much more. He was not the victim he had been playing. Was his boss sometimes difficult? Yes. Did Mark still sometimes feel mis-treated? Again, yes. Notwithstanding this, he realized that he had been using these issues as justifications for his own lack of effort. Some of the challenges he faced were real, but his constraints were mostly his own. He had always been free to do more and better.
Mark says that this experience was a career changer for him. He likely would not be where he is today had his mentor not cared about and believed enough in Mark and the company to tell him the truth about his performance and to invite him to do more.
With a renewed level of self-accountability, Mark began to flourish in his job. He began taking on more and more responsibilities, and his abilities grew with his performance. Within a year, this growth had prepared Mark for a great opportunity with one of the firm’s healthcare clients. His experience at that health-care company equipped him with the industry understanding that eventually enabled him to cofound his own company—an organization that has enriched the lives of millions.
Consider the central question that emerged from Mark’s story: What can I do to be more helpful?
What can I do to be more helpful at work? What can I do to be more helpful at home? What can I do to be more helpful to those I know and to those I don’t? What can I do? And will I see myself and others in ways that will enable me to do what I can do?
An indication of an outward mindset is the willingness of a person to honestly ask these questions in each area of his or her life, coupled with an excitement to begin acting on the answers despite challenges. If you consider the stories we have shared in this book, from Chip and his SWAT squad mixing baby bottles, to Alan Mulally saving Ford, to the woman who felt the desire to keep reaching out to her brother after his release from prison, you will see both this question and this energy at work.
So what will you do as you consider the people you work with and the people at home?
Consider what we have discussed. Whatever you do, you can do it with either an inward mindset or an outward mind-set. Which way you do it will determine to a large degree your results.
• Start with mindset. Apply the outward-mindset pattern, SAM: see others, adjust efforts, and measure impact (chapters 8, 9, and 11).
• Don’t wait for others to change. The most important move is to turn your mindset regardless of whether others change theirs (chapter 10).
• Mobilize yourself and your team or organization to achieve a collective goal (chapter 12).
• Allow people (beginning with yourself) to be fully responsible. Own your work—your plans, your actions, and your impact—and position others to own theirs (chapter 13).
• Eliminate the unnecessary distinctions that create distance between yourself and others (chapter 14).
• To the extent you have authority to do so, rethink systems and processes to turn them outward; create an organizational ecosystem that energizes people rather than manages objects (chapter 15).
We hope that for you this book has provided a service like the service provided to Mark Ballif by his mentor. If you have thought, I can do better than I have been doing, then the book will have been worth the read.
So what have you been seeing and thinking? And more importantly, what are you going to do about it?
We hope you have enjoyed reading The Outward Mindset. We have provided additional resources online, including a mindset audit tool that enables you to discover the degree to which you and your organization may be operating from an outward mindset. Additionally, many of the people we have written about in this book have graciously allowed us to film them and their organizations. If you would like to learn more from them, you can watch them share the details of their experiences at www.outwardmindset.com.