A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually, and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.
—Rita Mae Brown, mystery author
When we are coaching leaders who are having a tough time motivating others, it always becomes apparent that their basic problem is that they’re reacting to their people all day long.
They’re wallowing in their own negative emotional reactions to people. After a while, in listening to these types of managers, we get a funny impression that we’re listening to the words of country music. You know those country songs we’re talking about. The themes are: “I’ve been hurt so many times, I’m never going to reach out again,” or “I don’t trust women,” or “You can’t trust men.” Actual songs have titles such as “Is It Cold in Here or Is it You?” or “My Wife Ran Away with My Best Friend and I Miss Him.”
Country music in and of itself is great, and the really sad songs—the ones that express the poetry of victimization—are beautiful in their own way, but their basic philosophy is not an effective way to create the motivated team we want.
Managers who go through their days reacting emotionally to the behavior of their people truly are miserable. What those managers need is a gentle shift. Not a huge change, but a shift, just like the gentle shift of gears in a finely tuned car. They need to shift from reacting to creating. All of this reacting they do has become a habit, and because it’s only a habit, it’s completely open to a shift.
Business coach Dan Sullivan nails it when he says, “The difficulty in changing habits lies in the fact that we are changing something that feels completely natural to us. Good habits feel natural; bad habits feel natural. That is the nature of a habit. When you change a bad habit that feels natural to a good habit that feels natural, you feel exactly the same. It is just that you get completely different results.”
One of the first steps on the path out of the habit of reacting to the people we manage is to ask ourselves a simple question. It was a question first asked by Ralph Waldo Emerson many years ago: “Why should my happiness depend on the thoughts going on in someone else’s head?”
This question, no matter how we answer it in any given moment, gives us the mental perspective we need to start seeing the possibilities for creatively relating to others instead of just reacting to them.