“John, can you tell me what gets you out of bed in the morning? What makes you feel alive? What drives you?” What followed these fairly intrusive questions was a long silence. Obviously, John found it difficult to respond. Eventually, after some prompting, he came up with a number of rather clichéd answers. His inner drivers remained a mystery, however. His rather convoluted responses made me wonder whether he himself knew what he was all about. Was he one of those people who remain strangers to themselves? Did he allow himself time to reflect on the challenges he faced in life? Or was he playing ostrich, just pushing unpleasantries aside? When I met the members of his team—in trying to get a better sense of him—I asked them what they could say about John. How would they describe him? What did they think drove him? Their hesitant responses suggested that they were also at a loss. They didn’t really seem to understand him. To them, John appeared to be a blank page. Clearly, he was the kind of person who kept his distance. I wondered why? Why was he so hard to approach? Why was he such an enigma to others? At the same time, I wondered whether there was something that held his people back from talking about him. Were the people who reported to him afraid to speak their mind? Eventually, one of them remarked that although John was quite reserved, he didn’t mind being the center of attention. There were times when he would seek out the limelight. When I asked her to elaborate on this comment, her response was vague. But her observation about John’s need for attention stayed in my mind. In the short conversation I had with him, I’d also noticed contradictory forces of standoffishness and self-centeredness. All in all, he was not a person you easily warmed to.
Generally speaking, if we want to get the best out of ourselves and others, we need to understand why we do what we do; what motivates us to make specific choices. What can be said about the “scripts” people follow? I have always liked the idea of the inner theater, a conceptualization introduced to me by my first psychoanalyst (and later friend), Joyce McDougal. She wrote in one of her books: “[That] ‘All the world’s a stage,’ and that all the men and women in it are ‘merely players’ expressed Shakespeare’s deep conviction that we do not readily escape the roles that are essentially ours. Each of us is drawn into an unfolding life drama in which the plot reveals itself to be uncannily repetitive.”1 According to Joyce McDougal, if we want to understand the other, we have to make sense of their inner scripts.
A point Joyce made very clear to me during the many sessions I had with her was her belief that “Le rôle du psychanalyste est d’aider chacun à découvrir sa vérité” (“The role of a psychoanalyst is to help each person to find his or her truth”.)2 I still remember sitting in her office, full of paintings by her artist-psychoanalyst husband—a survivor of the World War II Bataan death march and Japanese captivity, hearing her say this. Joyce gave me his highly praised memoir, Give Us This Day , an account of the intense suffering of these prisoners.3 This book about the painfulness of the human condition made a deep impression on me. Now, many years later, I must confess that I very much miss our sessions. When she became my supervisor many years after I had my first analysis with her, she not only gave me a better understanding of my clients and myself, but also gave me many insights into the history of psychoanalysis—and how to live life in general.
Joyce helped me to become more sensitive to people’s inner theater—to identify their major “scripts”—and she made it quite clear to me that finding these scripts is difficult. Homo sapiens is a very complex animal. It is not always easy to make sense of a person like John. As there are many people like John who find it hard to respond to my questions about their drivers, and as a way of nudging them a little bit, I sometimes ask them what values they would like to impart to their children. I also ask them what kind of people they admire, and the reasons why? What makes those people so special to them? With respect to their values, I ask what kind of behavior they find unacceptable? Is there a red line that would them make quit their job? And why?
I find the responses to these questions helpful, as they encourage people to identify what’s really important to them. In addition, I sometimes ask them who, during the course of their lives, have been their major “scriptwriters”; who has had a significant influence in their lives—and why do they think that’s the case? Not surprisingly, when I ask the last question, the most common responses are intimate relationships with parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, teachers, spouses or partners, and even some of their bosses. Sometimes, however, the chosen role models are less personal. They might be historical and contemporary figures. I might also ask them sometimes what kind of “hedgehog” they are: the point is to try to gauge from their answer how close they can get to people? The reactions to this question give me an understanding of their developmental history.
Attachment Behavior
You may well ask how hedgehogs come into it. Imagine this: on a very cold winter’s day, a few hedgehogs are searching out other hedgehogs to huddle up with to keep warm. But because of their prickles they are forced to make a choice. Get close, stay warm, and get stabbed; or keep away, stay safe, and freeze. The pain from the mass of spines makes the hedgehogs separate, until the cold forces them back together. So, they keep on shuffling moving back and forth until they find the appropriate distance for both warmth and comfort. Of course, this story is a metaphor for the challenges of human intimacy. It is a way of describing a dilemma we all face, as we simultaneously crave and are wary of connection. Although we may intend to form close reciprocal relationships, this may not happen, for reasons that can have a long history.
The hedgehog dilemma was first outlined in 1851 by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who concluded that the hedgehogs “discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another.”4 In other words, the hedgehogs realized that while they wanted to be close, the only way to avoid hurting one another would be to avoid getting too close. But the degree of closeness is case specific. It all depends on the kind of attachment pattern you are comfortable with.
Attachment patterns turn out to be a key theme of the scripts and scriptwriters who help define our inner world. The nature of connectedness between human beings is very much dependent of how our parents respond to our needs while we grow up. The kind of interface we are exposed to will have a deep impact throughout our life. Fortunately, attachment theory helps explain how early parent-child relationships emerge—how it influences a person’s subsequent development.5 Here, our attachment pattern—based on our earliest life experiences—is the approach we will use to manage and maintain relationships, with respect our partners, or at work. While adult attachment patterns may not exactly correspond with early childhood attachments, there is no question that our earliest relationships with our caregivers play an important role in its outcome. By understanding better our attachment patterns, we will gain a greater appreciation of how the earliest attachments in our life have a fundamental impact on all our adult relationships.
Avoidant: I am not very comfortable coming close to others. Usually, others want to be closer to me than I am prepared to accept.
Secure: It is quite easy for me to get close to others. I am comfortable having people depend on me or having me depend on them.
Anxious: I find it difficult to accept that others are reluctant get as close to me as I would like. Unfortunately, my need to get closer to people sometimes frightens them away.
A secure attachment pattern is found among roughly half of us. The other patterns are more problematic. But before you start blaming your parents for relationship problems, keep in mind that they, like you, are just common mortals who had their own issues with their parents. Also, remember that attachment styles formed during early childhood are not necessarily identical to the patterns that come to the fore later in life. Much can happen between infancy and adulthood, so intervening experiences also play a large part in the creation of adult attachment patterns.
Attachment Styles and Life Anchors
This very brief summary of various attachment styles suggests that John’s is likely to be avoidant. Although this helps explain how he relates to others we would also benefit from understanding other aspects of his inner theater—his values, beliefs, and attitudes—which I identify as life anchors. Understanding our own life anchors will provide us with greater insight into what drives us, why we do what we do, and we you interact with others. It will make us less of a stranger to ourselves.
Our values , a set of abstract and general ideas and principles, form the core of our life anchors. Generally speaking, values underlie our judgments and guide our opinions on social, political, or religious issues. They are the foundation of our beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. For example, in France, where I live, you don’t have to go far to find the words liberté, égalité, fraternité (“liberty, equality, fraternity”) inscribed on all government buildings. These principles dictate what’s supposedly important in the lives of French people and shape their standards of behavior and guide their action. They can be defined as moral choices that they try to use consistently in life.
In contrast, beliefs are the ideas we generally hold to be true regardless whether or not they are supported by hard, factual, and empirical evidence. Our beliefs grow from what we see, hear, experience, read, and think about, creating the assumptions that we make about the world. They are more specific than values, as they are shaped by the successes and failures that we experience in everyday life.
Attitudes are our states of mind, feelings, or dispositions about certain issues. Our attitudes determine whether we think a specific situation or thing is good, worthwhile, valuable, or bad. Thus, when we “like” or “dislike” someone or something, we are expressing an attitude. I must emphasize, however, that attitudes, like values and beliefs, are mental constructs. They are inferred from the things we say or do.
These life anchors set the stage for our inner theater, with our attachment style providing the scenery. This inner theater will be colored by the things we learn from our parents and other significant figures while growing up. As far as this inner theater influences our thoughts, it has no external consequences. It does have consequences, however, when the scripts invite some form of action, subtle though those actions may be.
Our life anchors can be a shortcut to helping us understand what we are all about and how we see ourselves and perceive others. They underlie all our interpersonal relationships and lifestyle choices. They drive our behavior and give meaning to our life plans and designs. But identifying our life anchors can be a challenge and is not always to do alone, however. We might need the help of others. And to aid in this process, I have developed an instrument that helps identify some of our major motivational themes: The Inner Theater Inventory (ITI™).6 In this assessment instrument, I describe twenty-two life anchors that represent the most dominant drivers in our lives. The more prevalent of these are meaning, achievement, recognition, meaning, power, money, vengeance, learning/exploration, and lifestyle quality.7
Meaning . Meaning is probably our major existential concern, making it an essential life anchor. I have met many executives who only felt truly alive when they felt they had a purpose. They wanted to be connected to something larger than themselves. If they couldn’t find meaning in what they were doing, life became empty, leading to boredom, dissociation, and even feelings of alienation.
Achievement. People for whom this life anchor is important always try to meet or exceed specifically defined standards of excellence. They set challenging goals, taking calculated risks, and like to get results. Most likely, taking a developmental perspective, they were brought up by parents who also emphasized achievement. Working hard was the way to obtain their parents’ approval.
Recognition . People for whom this life anchor is important want to stand out and be admired. From early childhood, their sense of self is shaped by positive recognition and acknowledgment of their existence. Whether the interpersonal relations in their youth were characterized by under- or over-stimulation, the end result was to make them crave attention. For example, recognition was John’s life anchor. It explained his self-centeredness and narcissistic disposition and was complicated by his avoidant attachment style.
Power. For people for whom this life anchor is important, power is essential for their self-esteem. Their need for power will vary, however, depending on their experiences with authority and control during their formative years. Some people might be strongly driven to control other people’s lives as a way of compensating for feelings of inadequacy. Other power seekers may have a more constructive outlook. But when people become obsessed with power, the ending tends to be miserable for themselves and for others.
Money . Growing up in a household where money is scarce can create feelings of anxiety, helplessness, and dependency. For some people, the acquisition of money represents deliverance from misery, triumph over helplessness, escape from a gray existence, pathway to independence and security, and a boost to their self-esteem. Predictably, this particular life anchor has a flip side, when it becomes of overriding importance. Instead of bringing satisfaction, a preoccupation with limitless wealth may contribute to a sense of emptiness and even end in depressive reactions.
Vengeance . According to a Chinese proverb, “He who seeks vengeance must dig two graves: one for his enemy and one for himself.” The desire to inflict punishment in return for injury or insult is a natural human tendency, a form of defense against feeling wronged. But for some people, wanting to get even becomes a major life anchor. Fantasies of vindictiveness and revenge are often fed by the desire to restore personal integrity and recover from feelings of helplessness, violation, and injustice. The challenge for people blinded by revenge is to bury the hatchet and move on. Forgiveness and reparation are the cornerstones of a much more fruitful way of looking at life.
Learning/exploration . The love of learning can be an intense, life-long pursuit. People for whom this life anchor is important only feel truly alive when tackling new challenges, obsessed as they are by a love of understanding, the urge to “figure things out,” and their need to explore and inquire. Far too quickly, the tried and tested become boring to them and they often pursue one seemingly crazy idea after another—the entrepreneur and innovator Egon Musk, who belongs to a clan of Musk entrepreneurs, comes to mind.
Lifestyle quality . When lifestyle quality is a life anchor, executives prioritize finding a satisfactory balance between work, friends, and family. Often, this implies having a measure of control over when, where, and how they work. It’s likely that their experiences of family life when growing up—the absence of their busy parents from significant events—make them determined that their and their children’s lives will not be the same.
What Makes You Feel Alive?
In your journey of self-exploration—in your search for your most significant life anchors—it will always be a challenge to obtain a better understanding of your own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions. Only when you become more familiar with the hidden scripts in your inner theater will you begin to act in ways that are congruent with your overall value and belief system. When you understand your life anchors better, you will find out how you are perceived by others and how you can help others to better understand what drives you. You will be more aware of what is happening within and around you—how your inner world affects your outer world. You will be more conscious of your actions and behavior. Also, when you recognize the cognitive dissonance between your inner and outer worlds, you may be motivated to close the gap.
When you pay attention to your own life anchors, and those of others, you may also realize the richness of the interior lives of the people you deal with. You need to get away from the fallacy of thinking that everyone else thinks like you. Everybody’s story—in spite of the inevitable similarities—is unique. If you don’t make an effort to dig deeper, you may discover that your perceptions of others are completely wrong. And even when you do get to know them better, you may be only scratching the surface of what they are really all about. This observation reminds me of the words of the Irish poet John O’Donohue: “Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us. Now, other people can glimpse it from [its outer expressions]. But no one but you know what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it.”
The Inside-Outside Axis
Identifying your attachment pattern and life anchors will help you to make greater sense of your inner world. Although you may be in a hurry to change your outer world, having a better understanding of your inner world will help you to put things in greater perspective. Attachment patterns and life anchors will help you decipher your inner theater, your relationships with other people, how you work with others, and what can go wrong while doing so, if you don’t pay attention. But while you have a better understanding of the complexity of your inner theater, you should bear in mind that your inner world is always a work in progress, and that when things change inside you, they will also change around you.
From a work perspective, understanding your inner theater and that of others will make you more effective in interpersonal relationships, leading your teams, and help you to create the kinds of corporate cultures where everyone feels at his or her best. After all, the main challenge of leaders of organizations is talent and culture management—having an understanding of what makes people “tick” and giving them the opportunities to be the best that they can be. It will make you more effective in deciphering what motivates others. This approach is what differentiates run-of-the-mill from high-performing organizations.