Manage Your Emotions and Beliefs
Increasing your awareness of how your emotions and beliefs drive your thinking, influence your behavior, and affect your judgment will help you navigate life with confidence.
How you perceive and define reality is largely based on your emotions and your beliefs. Like GPS, these are helpful navigation tools for you, but they need to be monitored and calibrated to best guide you. That’s because they operate mostly behind the scenes and exert such a powerful effect in determining what you experience. This is the core of what the Manage Your Emotions and Beliefs principle is about, and your capability in this regard determines to a large extent your level of agency as it impacts the quality of all the decisions, large and small, that you make.
Emotions aren’t always easy to recognize.
At times of heightened emotions, your body signals arrive quickly and automatically, and they provide clues to help you to identify what you are feeling. Is your breathing fast or shallow? Are your muscles tight, especially around the forehead, neck, shoulders, back, and chest? These signals indicate fear, anxiety, and anger.
Other emotions, like guilt, envy, doubt, ambivalence, or nostalgia, are more complex, and require some reflection. Sometimes we have a nagging sense that something is wrong without being able to pinpoint the precise emotion in play. A neighbor tells us that they’re sending their kids to an expensive summer camp program. Are we jealous that they have the resources to do it or guilty that we aren’t giving our kids the same opportunity? These are complex feelings, but underneath is likely fear and worry.
To identify your emotions accurately and use them productively, you must assign them a proper name. The name you assign is a best guess, an interpretation of what you are experiencing. The goal is to recognize and label emotions in the moment and not allow them to overcome you, muddle your judgment, or go unaddressed.
Identifying your emotions, and their interplay with your sometimes unreasonable expectations for how you believe things should be, is absolutely central to agency. Until you can identify how a person, situation, or idea influences how you feel, why it makes you feel that way, and how it relates to the way you believe things should be in an ideal world, it’s difficult to decide how to act.
To have full agency, you need to adjust and update your beliefs periodically, and that requires a willingness to differentiate what’s real from what’s not real. John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of all time, said it quite plainly: “I change my mind when the facts change. What do you do?” At times, strong emotions can distract and exhaust you, but it’s inaccurate, unexamined beliefs that truly can dominate and cloud your better judgment. That’s because beliefs, like road maps, are referenced constantly to help you direct yourself and move ahead. If they’re outdated or distorted, you won’t get to where you really want to go.
Your brain is a predictive organ. It is on a mission to predict all possible next situations, to anticipate what may happen, and to offer up next-best choices and actions. The latest research on brain science by people like Lisa Barrett, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Northeastern University, tell us that the brain isn’t sitting there passively waiting for the environment to give it something to see, hear, taste, touch, or smell but rather actively interpreting these signals and making predictions based on them. It isn’t waiting around to calculate or solve problems only when you summon it. It’s many steps ahead of you all the time and is actually leading you more often than you are leading it. And at times, your brain’s perceptions and predictions can be distorted or misled by your emotions—and even more so by your beliefs.
This chapter will teach you how to stay on top of your emotions and beliefs so that your brain can perform its mission better and more accurately. This will help you build an inner agency voice that guards against highly reactive emotions and distorted beliefs undermining what you want to do and where you want to go in your life.
Use Your Agency: Your agency voice is tied to an optimistic mind-set: I’m capable, it’s worth a try. A non-agency voice tends to be negative and self-critical: I’m too old, my résumé isn’t right, life isn’t fair.
What are beliefs? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a belief as “a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing” or “something that is accepted, considered to be true, or held as an opinion.”
For the purposes of agency, we focus on beliefs as a place from where many of our self-defeating behaviors emanate. Beliefs are often overly simplistic, all encompassing, and used as shortcuts to thinking. For example, holding the belief Investing in stocks is speculative and dangerous could lead one to rule out considering something that could be important to one’s future retirement needs. Or, One must have one’s career pinned down by thirty because after that it is impossible to change could result in professional inertia that’s hard to break through. The formation of our personal beliefs typically occurs outside the rules of logic. This leads to the common experience that our beliefs, and the expectations that accompany them, are often contradicted by reality. At those times, agency is required to take a step back and reflect on the accuracy and the validity of the belief.
The problem is that we simply have a hard time stepping outside of our beliefs to question them. Anytime you have felt held back by doubt, chances are high that a belief was to blame. She’s wonderful and she makes me very happy, but I’ve been down that road before and don’t think a serious relationship is for me. Or, Everything’s about having the right connections—there’s no sense in me applying for that job. Sometimes these kind of locked beliefs are expressed in “nobody else” or “everybody else” statements, along the line of Nobody else believes I am difficult to understand or Everybody else knows she’s a bad person. Our beliefs end up being wrong much more often than we realize because we don’t stop long enough to look at them. They become simply a habit of mind. Furthermore, when a belief we hold is disconfirmed by what we actually observe, we often choose to ignore it. Updating beliefs isn’t easy, as it can feel unsettling, but it’s the only way to stay grounded and grow as a person—and develop greater agency.
Paul’s Notes from the Field: Childhood Beliefs Can Simmer for Decades
Shortly after Bob’s oldest son, Matt, turned nine, Bob found himself fighting with him a lot. Up to then, the two had been, in Bob’s words, “thick as thieves.” Bob was not an overly strict father. Standing at an imposing six feet three inches tall, he was known to everyone as a gentle giant. His wife, Marla, noticed something suddenly change in Bob. He was yelling at Matt nightly about his homework and criticizing him for being sloppy at the breakfast table. He complained when Matt didn’t put 100 percent into his soccer practice. Matt started to avoid being around his father, sometimes cried at bedtime when Marla tucked him in, and within a few weeks, his teacher was emailing that Matt seemed distracted in class and was falling behind.
The weeks that ensued got worse, and Bob suffered what his wife described as a slow motion nervous breakdown as he became difficult with everyone. Everything felt off, like the family was coming apart at the seams. Marla, a seasoned mental health professional in the Chicago area, had the wherewithal to know that the problem wasn’t their son. She convinced Bob to get into therapy. He was reluctant, as many men are to seek help from a stranger, but smartly agreed. Bob was fortunate to see a very experienced psychotherapist who was also near his work in Hyde Park, a more psychodynamically oriented clinician who encouraged Bob to explore earlier memories for clues as to why his life might suddenly derail. What was uncovered during the therapy was illuminating.
Many years back, not coincidentally when Bob was also nine, there was a tectonic shift in his family. His sister Gretchen was born with profound cognitive and physical delays. Bob’s father had to work even more hours to keep the family financially secure, while Bob, being the oldest son, was suddenly thrust into adult responsibilities. Most of the day, he was in charge of caring for his other younger siblings. He stepped up to the challenge. He helped out as needed without complaint. He got his younger siblings to school and did chores, and he even served as a source of comfort and emotional support for his mother.
In his therapy, Bob uncovered beliefs that were driving the dysfunction and emotional pain. Interestingly, these beliefs didn’t emerge until his own son turned nine. What were these destructive beliefs? By nine years old, terrible and unexpected things are likely to happen. You need to be a man and grow up fast. You can never fail those around you.
There’s a hidden potency to many of our deepest-held beliefs. We often adopt beliefs without conscious scrutiny. Some can poison us with untruths and kick up destructive fear and aggression. They can lead us down unhealthy paths of behaviors. Some beliefs, like Bob’s, lie dormant for years. They’re like land mines that get set off when we step on similar life terrain.
Why we apply such outdated and often untrue beliefs years, even decades, later to our current lives makes no sense. It’s illogical, but we do it anyway. The mind is trying to guide us by linking current experiences to similar past experiences, but it doesn’t know if those experiences are still helpful years later. Beliefs that were helpful at one point in our lives may not be helpful at other points and may even be destructive. Stated differently, sometimes the coping skills we had as children were necessary in the context of what was going on then but are no longer adaptive in adulthood.
Understanding his beliefs and getting them into the daylight was a game changer for Bob. He set to work figuring how to flag his strong emotions early, labeling them as likely caused by his outdated underlying beliefs. He began channeling his fear and anger into physical outlets, making certain he got a daily dose of healthy exercise, like a good workout or a long run. Bob developed greater empathy for the boy he was at nine years of age as well as greater empathy for Matt. Matt fell back into being a nine-year-old and regained his close relationship with his father, receiving his understanding and support. Marla maintains a watchful eye, as many partners and parents do, to monitor when unhealthy beliefs might be driving up emotions. The two of them have developed a signal between them: When Marla senses Bob is too stressed or heading into being critical of Matt, she gives him one of her looks—an empathetic smile with eyebrows raised. It helps Bob catch himself early, stopping strong beliefs from reappearing again where they’re no longer useful or helpful.
Of the seven principles laid out in this book, Manage Your Emotions and Beliefs may be the one that requires the most effort. That’s because emotions and beliefs often operate beneath our awareness. It takes considerable mental effort to identify your emotions and beliefs and to see yourself more objectively. But this increased self-awareness can be learned and becomes easier as you do so. Being more aware of yourself through self-reflection helps to keep you grounded by slowing down your thinking process—highly beneficial in an age of overwhelm. We’re all swimming in a hyperstimulated sea of digital information and rapid change that drives up anxiety and emotion. In short, the more amped-up emotion you are feeling, the less grounded and logical you likely will be—and that means the less agency you will have. You won’t be as effective at thinking critically and making good decisions for yourself.
Practicing Self-Awareness Can Dissipate Overwhelm
When you’re feeling overwhelmed, one of the best steps to take is to identify what is making you feel that way. Lots of times you think you know, when it turns out you were focused on the wrong thing.
To develop your self-awareness, start small. Practice becoming more conscious of what’s going on inside your mind one situation at a time. It’s best to choose a time when you register stress, strong emotion, or find yourself falling easily into the mind-set and following the actions of the herd.
For example, become more self-aware at lunch when your colleagues are drawing you into unkind gossip, or at home when a relative or friend dominates a conversation. When you’re on a bus or train or driving in traffic, see if you note a rise in aggressive or fearful thoughts inside yourself. In such situations, adrenaline rises and, with it, irrational thoughts like everyone in the world is rude, all drivers are terrible, and they’re all hell-bent on making you late for work. When you’re sitting at your desk watching emails pile up and feeling overwhelmed, that’s a good time to practice being more self-aware.
Ask yourself: How am I feeling right now? What am I thinking? What emotional signals have just been launched? Some people tell us they take a break from what they’re doing as soon as they start feeling overwhelmed. They may stand or walk a few steps or simply look out a window and focus on something else. One woman we know looks in a mirror when she realizes she is feeling highly stressed. This focuses her full attention onto herself and helps her figure out what’s going on inside. Some people close their eyes when they feel overwhelmed and breathe in and out slowly, another technique to become more self-aware. After getting yourself to a more relaxed state, next attempt to tie your emotion, and any distorted beliefs that emerged, to the situation taking place. Try to see the original emotion as simply a signal. Don’t allow the strong feeling to dominate or take root. Recognize the ensuing belief as a provisional construct caused by that strong feeling and likely not very accurate.
By doing this, you won’t be a passive recipient of what your mind is doing behind the scenes. You will become more aware of the thousands of automatic daily messages, signals, beliefs, expectations, or other thoughts in your head. Some of what your brain is sending you is helpful, well-intentioned, and maybe necessary, but a lot of it is biased, exaggerated, and trimmed to fit your desire or habit of seeing the world a certain way. Much of it can be flat-out wrong.
A key way to both more precisely define and work through your emotions is to communicate them to others. Talking about your feelings with supportive others helps you to better interpret and articulate more complex feelings. I’m not comfortable with that guy can turn into That guy doesn’t respect my privacy, which leaves me feeling vulnerable and embarrassed.
We often recommend to clients books and articles written by psychologist Daniel Goleman on emotional intelligence, also known as EQ, which involves developing personal skills that help you better identify your emotions and communicate on an emotional level. Psychologist Lisa Barrett recommends, among other things, that you work to improve your emotional granularity, which is making finer distinctions among your feelings. Developing a larger emotional vocabulary to describe the true complexity of your feelings helps you to be more precise. For example, it is less helpful to lump all your negative feelings into a simple phrase like “I feel bad.” Instead, being more precise, “I feel angry when my girlfriend expects too much from me,” gets you much further. People with higher EQ and emotional granularity have more agency. This is because the ability to identify and express our emotions more accurately helps us to avoid common traps that get in the way of good decision-making and greater intimacy in our relationships.
The family dynamics in Anthony’s office presented by Julie and her kids provide a good example of the role of self-awareness in managing emotions and beliefs. Julie worked as a manager in a health-care software business. She recently left her position to become a stay-at-home mother. She has two young children and a husband who travels a lot for his job. Julie has an MBA and is used to being independent, and she prides herself on being good at solving problems.
She and her two children had just arrived in Anthony’s office, and her husband was calling in to attend the session on his cell phone while driving to a work meeting. Julie was explaining that she loses it a lot with her kids. There was too much yelling at their house, with everyone ratcheting up reactions to each other. Even there on the couch in the office, the kids were getting testy. “Please! Settle down and focus, and please don’t interrupt me when I’m talking; it’s my turn, not yours,” Julie said with pressured speech and a raised voice. Her youngest son started whining and thrashing. Her husband was trying to say something, but the connection was going in and out. Julie looked at Anthony, eyes wide, eyebrows raised, hands gesturing in exasperation. You see what I’m dealing with? her face seemed to say.
Here’s what Anthony said to Julie:
“This … is how … we talk … to our children…” The youngest child locked eyes with Anthony, fascinated. Anthony continued in a rhythmic, exaggeratedly slow, singsong way. “That’s how … teachers talk … when they are … calming down … their classrooms … with lots of kids.” The youngest child, mesmerized, settled back, nestled against his mom, his thumb finding its way into his mouth. He began to slightly nod off. His sensory systems were no longer being overwhelmed, and his emotions were starting to settle down. Once everyone was calm, Anthony could ask Julie about some of her beliefs about parenting. She looked at him, a bit confused. She said she was a good communicator, she was effective in her job, people listened to what she told them to do at work, so it must be something going on with the kids. She assumed it was likely a problem with their development.
Anthony helped Julie to recognize she was operating with a core personal belief that was setting her parenting up to fail. With some discussion, Anthony got Julie to pinpoint this belief: I’m smart and competent at work. People listen to me and readily do what I say. I believe it should go similarly at home. This led to an unrealistic expectation: I expect my skills at work to translate directly to the job of raising my children. It’s an easy error to make unless a person slows down and thinks things through.
Another point: You must manage your own emotions and beliefs first if you want to help another person to manage their own. Without doing this, you can’t be a highly effective parent. You also can’t effectively lead and manage others at work. As they say on an airplane flight, in the event of an emergency, put on your own oxygen mask first.
Further conversations with Julie got her to appreciate that the demands of being a mom are not the same as managing adults in a business (in fact, they’re often harder). She readily acknowledged that there’s something about how she thinks and feels that’s related to the stress she experiences. She was willing to delve deeper to better understand this. She connected a few important data points from her own history. She told Anthony that she was from a perfectionistic family that talked about success this way: Every problem can be solved … the harder you try, the more quickly problems get solved … and when problems don’t get solved, you alone are to blame. “That way of thinking doesn’t work with a five-year-old,” she reminded herself during one of our meetings.
Managing her emotions and beliefs is an ongoing effort that helps Julie move her feelings and thoughts more into the light. She now asks herself, What are reasonable goals for the morning, the day, the evening with my two young, active boys? What constitutes success with a five-year-old? By doing so, she’s recalibrating the unrealistic expectations for success that she picked up from her childhood, which her underlying beliefs had been reinforcing. This principle is helping her regain her confidence as a parent and to feel calmer, and that’s helping her kids stay calm. She’s enjoying time with her kids more.
We “inherit” many beliefs from our parents, from our families and relatives, from friends and coworkers, schools, religious institutions, and the neighborhoods we were raised in. Affiliation is a very powerful human trait—through being social, bonding, dating, falling in love, and choosing a career path, we continually strive to be connected and close to others. Along the way, we also develop a tendency to think similarly to the people we find attractive, powerful, and helpful to us, and to those whom we wish to emulate. We often unwittingly adopt the beliefs of those people we admire and sometimes those whom we fear.
Some of our beliefs aren’t formed from the particulars of our upbringing but are absorbed from the wider culture around us. These are ways of thinking that are broadly held and go unquestioned within society, and many can be incorrect and stubbornly hard to update. The world is flat and The sun revolves around the earth have—we would hope by now—been put to rest, but you can find some people who still insist that those beliefs hold true. Women’s brains are not as good as men’s at science or People of different skin colors have distinctly different intellectual potentials or Gay people can’t parent as effectively as straight people are similarly entrenched beliefs for some people. You may be a person who still thinks some of these beliefs are accurate and valid despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. You may find that when you hear others use research to (falsely) back up untrue beliefs, it appeals to what you already believe. These ideas may resonate with what you learned growing up in your family, your town, your house of worship, or from the geographic region you live in. Or, it may appeal to you because it’s simply how you wish things to be.
Strong, unexamined beliefs can hinder our growth and put us at serious risk of not adapting as our life circumstances change. Think of the belief Never trust anyone outside of family, which, if fully adhered to, would prevent you from learning broadly by severely limiting your access to resources. Or the old saying Spare the rod, spoil the child, which could result in a visit from child protective services. Or the belief Immigrants are prone to criminal activity, which would result in any number of unfortunate, potentially ugly outcomes, not least of which would be the avoidance of many good people. Or a woman we know from England who believed it “selfish” to negotiate the initial salary offer she received from an employer—resulting in her colleagues getting higher salaries—consequently her salary, many years later, has never caught up with those of her peers.
You may stay stuck, trying to mold everything in your surroundings to your way of thinking rather than expanding your range by learning and thereby bettering yourself. Strong beliefs, left unchecked, reduce agency.
Use Your Agency: Are you holding on to outdated beliefs? Some of the beliefs that we inherit from our parents or early life experiences may no longer adequately fit as we find out more about the world.
As adaptive mechanisms, our emotions are there to protect us from perceived threats. Fear, driven by the well-known fight-or-flight response, arose at a time when human beings had to struggle for existence on a daily basis. For those of us living in relatively modern societies, many of the problems we face are not best handled with fight or flight, even if our bodies trigger that response.
When your emotional signals fire, you experience feelings as real. These are real signals, after all, that are happening in your mind and body and are not easy to ignore. But remember that most emotions are mostly misfires—false alarms. For that reason, you don’t benefit from grasping hold of one feeling, obsessing over it, nursing it, and making all your decisions based on it. To maintain agency, you have to learn how to monitor, interpret, and regulate your emotions. For example, you can easily go into high alert while standing in a long line at the bank, or waiting on a crowded subway platform with screeching trains, or viewing news containing a fear-provoking segment with negative images. Adrenaline levels can rise, and blood pressure can elevate just while waiting for a file to download. Consider how often during your day you see something on social media that interrupts your train of thought—and suddenly you are feeling an unexpected, strong emotion you weren’t feeling a second earlier.
This is why we tell people that feelings are intended to be ephemeral, and that, in a healthy state, they should come and go. It’s often when we grab hold of an emotion and don’t let it go, feeding it by giving it a lot of attention, that it becomes problematic. At the same time, welcome feelings when they help you feel more alive and connected with the world around you. Paul recalls a TV producer in Los Angeles saying to him, “If a day goes by and I don’t have a hearty laugh, I kind of think that it wasn’t a great day—and by same token, if I don’t shed a tear or two, it wasn’t a full day.”
Let Your Feelings Come, and Then Let Them Go
Getting caught up in feelings and obsessing over them will hurt you. Don’t talk about them incessantly unless you have a strategy to understand and ameliorate them. If you want to vent, fine, but many people often can get tangled up in this. They think they’re releasing the emotion, and instead, by talking and talking about it, they’re reexposing themselves to more emotion.
When you’re encumbered by strong negative emotions, try this instead: Picture that you’re stopped at a railroad crossing, and you are watching a slow train pass by. Envision that each car is a feeling. Watch it come, and watch it go. Watch the next one come, and let it go. Practice “seeing” your feelings as train cars that pass in front of you, coming and going.
If you’re more movement oriented, you can cleanse your mind and body with healthy, strong physical activity. Tell yourself you are channeling the feeling out of your mind and the adrenaline out of your body. Many people talk about sweating out their toxins, and you can similarly sweat out strong emotions.
Anything can trip your mind and body to start signaling you, and your threshold for keeping these signals in check is lowered when you are tired, stressed, rushed, and when your mind is crowded by incoming information. Surrounded now by so many digital devices, we can expect more emotional (and largely false) bursts of fear, worry, anger, hostility, and aggression.
Bear in mind, humans are not digital. We’re not designed to process the information coming at us at such high volume and speed. We’re not unfeeling machines that can simply be programmed or upgraded to a faster processor. We’re highly vulnerable, thinking creatures. We’re constantly absorbing everything around us, including a stream of messages and signals being generated inside our brains. It’s a lot of influence, noise, and nudging to try to process, and the brain is constantly trying to make sense of it all. The entire ecosystem of our bodies is doing its best to adapt, process, stay balanced, and guide us onto next steps.
Major League Baseball legend Derek Jeter was always a cool customer on the playing field. In the fall of 2014, during the final games of his last season on the New York Yankees, people watched him stoically study the field as he watched his team lose again and again. This was, in many ways, an unfamiliar situation for him and for his fans—the Yankees are one of the winningest teams in baseball, and Jeter, the team captain, had been one of the solidest players of the modern baseball era. Jeter’s fans desperately wanted to see him express a frustration and an anger to match their own.
In the final inning of his storied career and in the final minutes at play in Yankee Stadium, Jeter concentrated all his passion into his game and hit a walk-off single, resulting in a 6–5 win against the Baltimore Orioles.
After a tough game and a challenging season for the team, the moment was poetic. Watching the team captain waving to the cheering fans, smiling and tearing up, was enthralling. Only then, when the game was over, did Jeter give expression to the bittersweet mixture of joy, gratitude, love, and sadness he felt during this incredible moment in baseball history.
Jeter is an example of how people who demonstrate agency manage the emotional and thought centers of their brains. In general, the people we’ve met who have the most agency grasp the difference between feelings and facts. Many identify their worries and obsessions early, naming them in order to keep them at bay so they don’t unduly cloud their judgment—or in the case of this elite athlete, interfere with his performance under extreme pressure. They exercise traits of being open-minded, philosophical, and thoughtful. They adopt a big-picture view rather than getting caught up in passing, distracting details. When they express sentiments, they make sure it’s the right time and situation so that it is helpful to themselves and others.
How do the Jeters of the world do this? How do they maintain their control and composure, unlike volatile athletes such as John McEnroe, who was infamous for his explosive antics on the tennis court?
Let’s look again at Jeter himself. There were clues seven months earlier, at the press conference where he announced his retirement from the game that he so loved and from the team that he’d been with for twenty-six years, since he was drafted out of high school. The room was packed with reporters. “Why aren’t you showing any emotion?” they baited. What they got instead was a brief insight into his self-control.
Use Your Agency: Guard against emotional inflation. Emotions can take over and become a runaway train. Use rational, slower thinking skills to keep these fast, incendiary emotions in check.
Jeter leaned into the microphone. “I have feelings,” he acknowledged. “I’m not emotionally stunted. I’ve just been pretty good at trying to hide my emotions throughout the years. I try to have the same demeanor each and every day. It’s not the end of season yet—we still got a long season to go.”
To us, that press conference was another example of the same control Jeter has consistently shown on the field. If you ever watched him play, you would have seen none of the chest-beating self-congratulations, anger, or inflated sense of self that is typical of many pro athletes. He stood at the plate waiting for pitches, focused on the moment with a Buddha-like expression. Packed stadiums. A raucous, often obscenity-laced roar. Millions watching on television. Such stimuli are beyond what most people ever face. Yet none of it ever seemed to shake him. It’s a model for agency-managed behavior that is worth studying and emulating.
Anthony’s Notes from the Office: The Dueling Styles of Jeter and McEnroe
Not long after the broadcast of Derek Jeter’s last game as a New York Yankee, I met with an aggressive ninth grader who was in the habit of picking fights. Scott seemed to relish opportunities where he could show his strength. That got him labeled a bully, mostly while playing sports like basketball and lacrosse. His younger brothers, who often sat patiently in my waiting area with their mother, confided in me that they were afraid of Scott’s outbursts.
But Scott had everyone fooled. Below the surface—in the quiet of my office—I could hear his self-doubt and vulnerability. He was using aggression to cover up how helpless and insecure he actually felt about not being as good an athlete as his peers. He also struggled academically, and that piled onto a growing self-hate.
Scott, like a lot of fifteen-year-olds, was also stubborn and unlikely to benefit from my telling him directly what he should and shouldn’t do, so I showed him some YouTube videos of Jeter. After watching a few minutes, he shrugged. Then I played another clip, for contrast, of another talented athlete: John McEnroe. His tantrums on the tennis court during his most successful years in the 1970s and ’80s are legendary. If Jeter was Buddha behind the plate, McEnroe was Godzilla on the court. I clicked between Jeter and McEnroe.
“Which one would you want to have as your coach or teammate?” I asked him. “Who’s the cooler guy? Who is likely to be the more consistent performer?”
Scott laughed. He found McEnroe “a bit out there and funny—maybe a little cool,” but he also admitted he was way over the top. Scott saw Jeter as the model of self-control he preferred. Scott was also surprised to learn that sportswriters have said that given McEnroe’s great athletic talent, he could have had a more winning record and a longer career had he been less inclined to throw tantrums.
Scott seemed to get my message. He was on the road to building his agency. It would take time and work to teach him to use better behaviors when his emotions flared—when he felt overly angry and worried—based on irrational beliefs that he wasn’t measuring up, was physically weak, and was not very smart. Adding to this, testosterone in his young, developing body was building up, and he needed regular, vigorous, positive movement to channel aggression. Along with the agency principle of movement, managing his emotions and beliefs were critical tools to help him through his teen years.
Our beliefs drive our emotions both positively and negatively. Having a strong sense of our worth and abilities is crucial to our sense of agency. When we have a positive belief in our capabilities and ability to act on a situation, it gives us emotional fuel to make a positive difference.
Paul met a woman, Lenka, who was a successful entrepreneur in Michigan. She had grown up in Romania, where she had been trained as an engineer but where her possibilities were quite limited. After she moved to the United States, she started a new life and completely reinvented herself.
“Here I can do anything if I put energy and time into it,” she told Paul. “I can experience myself differently here.” Although she wouldn’t have put it this way, Lenka was speaking with a strong agency voice. She was acutely aware of the possibilities open to her (and ready to seize upon them) after moving to a country with more economic opportunity.
To be clear, there are certainly going to be times when Lenka feels discouraged. That’s when a negative belief can rise up and sabotage how she feels about herself. Everyone experiences these moments. Think of the last time you felt unempowered—maybe depressed, anxious, or just somewhat stuck—chances are there was a trail of negative thoughts and feelings that got you to that state. And behind that were beliefs. If you had put some energy into reflecting on it, you may have been able to figure out what that negative belief was … I’ve just never been good with numbers … Opportunity never comes my way.
Buzz Luttrell, an Emmy Award–winning television talk-show host, has wrestled with some very powerful negative beliefs, but it wasn’t always like that. He was born in 1944 and grew up in western Michigan. He told us that in high school, he was a star: class president, a member of the National Honor Society, a trumpet player in a dance band. On top of all that, he lettered in six sports—football, basketball, baseball, track, cross-country, and golf. Buzz was the whole package. “I expected that I would succeed and that doors would open for me,” he said.
But one harsh, damaging experience destroyed that belief and instilled another—and that new belief ended up keeping him off-kilter for many years. His high school gave out an annual award for the school’s top athlete, and at the awards ceremony his senior year, Buzz sat ready, expecting his name to be called. Everyone else seemed to expect it, too. But Buzz is black, and this was 1962, and when the name was called, it wasn’t his—it was a white student’s, someone who didn’t have anywhere near Buzz’s record of accomplishments. For the first time in his life, Buzz felt the punch of raw racism as the award he thought was his fell out of his grasp. It was a belief crash—there was no way he could fit this reality into his belief system, which up to that moment had felt like life offered a fair playing field.
The results of that single moment can’t be overstated. Buzz told us he went off to college with a chip on his shoulder. He closed down socially, grew defensive and angry, and became a heavy secret drinker. Anger permeated the early adult years of his life. That’s the power a belief system can exert—it affects how we feel about ourselves and our possibilities. While his belief system was based on a formative event that had occurred long ago in his past—something very real and not exaggerated—the strong negative feelings associated with it persisted. It would have continued causing Buzz problems had he not examined it and, with the help and support of his wife, Marva, come to see himself and his possibilities anew, allowing him to actualize the many talents he possessed. Now retired from television, Buzz has become a teacher of young black men, teaching them how to succeed and manage themselves through the racism that persists. “The anger still is there,” he said. “I still get surges of adrenaline, but I’ve learned how to channel it.”
A central premise of our book is that there’s an epidemic of anxiety in the United States, which is eroding our agency. The reason we bring up anxiety again is that, in our view, it is the primary emotion that many people have to deal with. Exposure to anxiety from which you cannot escape—or perceive you cannot escape—leads to giving up, giving in, not trying, and accepting negative fates. That’s the crux of learned helplessness, which we discussed in the agency principle Move.
Take a few minutes and ask yourself, Do I even know when I am feeling anxious? (Most people do not.) What’s my relationship with anxiety? How does it affect me? Knowing the answers to these types of questions will help you better understand and address how this primary emotion may be significantly undermining your agency.
• How do feelings of anxiety show up in your life, in your family’s routines, while you are at work?
• Can you recognize when anxious feelings arise?
• How do you respond to feeling anxious?
• Do you have a self-management approach to it?
• How dysfunctional do you become when you’re feeling very anxious?
• What are the most common unhealthy (and healthy) habits and behaviors you engage in when you are feeling anxious?
To be clear, anxiety is a normal human emotion. It warns us of threats, makes us slow things down in case we might be getting into the wrong situation. It can sometimes prevent us from taking rash action. But when it’s creating obsessive worry about the future—causing you to believe you are facing a set of circumstances that haven’t yet happened—anxiety becomes a hindrance rather than a help.
Managing your emotions and beliefs means managing adrenaline. Adrenaline, also known as epinephrine, is a hormone that surges through our bodies when we are feeling stressed and anxious. The physical effects are increased rates of blood circulation, faster breathing, and sometimes a kind of white-noise breakdown in your ability to think straight. Adrenaline is crucial in allowing your body to go into a fight-or-flight response, but too much adrenaline over the long haul is damaging to your physical health.
Adrenaline exerts a powerful effect, either enhancing quick decision-making or making people freeze up altogether. In short, it’s something you want in your body rarely, only when true threats are imminent. The bottom line is that adrenaline, beyond its longer-term health consequences, is often a catalyst for negative responses and can lead to overreaction and bad choices. In today’s stressful, overstimulated world, its influence on our mental state and decision-making cannot be overstated.
Self-control is about regulating your emotions and matching emotions appropriately to the situation. If emotions appear like they are coming out of nowhere, it’s a problem. When adults scream, whine, stomp, or unnecessarily withdraw, they look immature or, worse, unstable. Others recoil or simply move away in disgust. People with agency have emotional self-control, and it’s a quality that others find attractive. Being around people who are capable of regulating their emotions facilitates greater cooperation, calm, and a sense of emotional safety. People who are capable of regulating their emotions are safer to become attached to as they engender trust.
The Moments After You Lose Control
What do you do after an outburst or significant loss of self-control? You probably feel a bit embarrassed, exhausted, and wish you had used a better approach to deal with your emotions. If someone was on the receiving end of your anger, you may wonder how best to fix the situation. If it happens regularly, you may wonder how you are perceived by others who witness such outbursts.
• Acknowledge that you lost control. Acknowledge it to yourself, and then acknowledge it either verbally or in a note to the person who directly experienced your emotional outburst. Don’t procrastinate—do it as soon as possible.
• Apologize. Apologizing helps you take ownership (you can start by apologizing to yourself). It also helps you to regroup with yourself and the people you interacted with. Think of an Etch A Sketch. Sometimes you need to shake things off and try for a fresh start. But don’t pretend it didn’t happen, and don’t avoid the people you lost it in front of.
• Come up with strategies to manage yourself better next time. A few examples: Pay attention to physical signs that your body is gearing up for a fight. Breathe to reduce muscle tension. Slow down your speech. If you’re about to yell, stop the moment you recognize what you’re about to do—stop midsentence if you have to. Lower your head a few degrees, for a moment, to signal to others you aren’t a threat. Check your arms and hands to see if they look tense. Unball your fists and let your shoulders down. If you’re still tense, change location. Walk away for a few moments, but tell others why: “I need to collect my thoughts. Give me a few minutes.”
We are all influenced by emotionally appealing, strongly worded messaging. As discussed, many of us readily adopt the views of people we see as attractive, strong, decisive, and confident. Such charismatic people are adept at reading other people’s needs and wants, and they know what buttons to push to nudge others in their direction. Groups we identify with have a particularly powerful influence over us as well. When exposed to these strong influences, you need to keep yourself calm and centered; otherwise, you can’t think logically and independently. Heightened emotions move you from slower logical thinking to thinking that is reactionary and impulsive. Think of what happens when a mob of people is engaged—is there much independent thinking occurring? Keeping your head at such moments is essential to agency. It requires you to critically evaluate the powerful, emotionally appealing messages coming at you that can forestall independent judgment.
Mike is a tall man in his early fifties who maintains the athletic build of his college days. People gravitate toward Mike. He’s friendly and funny, and he projects confidence in himself. He’s assertive about his viewpoints, for which many people view him as smart. Mike has never seen himself as gullible, but that changed on a cruise ship in the Caribbean a few years ago.
“A hypnotist got me,” Mike admitted a bit sheepishly. “It was a nightclub show we went to after dinner. Maybe way deep down, I wanted to get up on the stage with the others, and somehow I just let go of thinking for myself. The hypnotist started by telling the audience that only some of us could be hypnotized. Before long, I was up there, my wife later said, acting like a robot or something and, honestly, I don’t recall much of it.”
That cruise ship experience led Mike to wonder if maybe he wasn’t always the strong-minded, independent guy he’d thought he was. Examining himself deeper led to some interesting insights. As a boy, he recalled seeking out strong, confident male role models. Fortunately, he had good people to model, like his football coaches. He recalled trying hard to impress male teachers that he admired. After college, Mike sought out successful men to be business mentors who could guide him in his career. Looking back, this desire to connect with other men and get their approval makes sense. Mike’s dad walked out on his family when Mike was very young. Most of the male relationships Mike has found since have been positive, except for one. Ten years ago, Mike was led into some bad financial investments. “I trusted this guy too fast. He was senior, accomplished, sounded smart. I followed everything he told me to do, but he may have been a bit of a con artist. I wanted to believe he would help me. Men who sound powerful and talk a good game, well, it can be a bit of a blind spot for me.”
People with agency acknowledge they are no less susceptible to gullibility than anyone else. In other words, they acknowledge their gullibility. They regularly examine themselves to figure out where their potential blind spots are. What physical state leaves me most vulnerable to being easily influenced (tired, hungry, physically unwell)? Who am I most likely to be influenced by? What situations? Groups? Men? Women? Attractive? Smart? Socially aggressive? Hard to get to know and aloof, or people who are gregarious? People with agency also work at flagging when an idea or message sounds powerful or seductive, and they try to hold it at arm’s length. They try to adjust for the persuasive marketing that ideas and messages often are packaged in. These are some of the ways they maintain healthy skepticism. And yet they aren’t closed-minded or oppositional. They know it’s important to be open to new ideas, products, and ways of thinking. They know it’s valuable to join in with groups, but they do so with their eyes open, knowingly, not unthinkingly.
Here are a few tactical approaches for you to consider:
• Hit the Pause button as soon as you sense someone is trying hard to sell you an idea or a product or if you feel pressured to go along with the pull of a group.
• Consider what you’ve just heard. Mull it over in your head. Does it still sound like it fits with how you see things? Your beliefs?
• Compare what you’re being told with what you already know. Try to be factual. Fact-check, like a journalist. Google it, and ask others you trust. Get a few independent sources.
• Along similar lines, seek out more information as needed before signing on to anyone else’s beliefs or adopting a group’s viewpoints. You should feel comfortable and calm when you adopt another person’s or group’s viewpoints or behaviors.
• Ask reasonable and probing questions anytime you want. Act like an investigative reporter or a good talk-show host. One of the best questions we ask in our work when we’re evaluating the beliefs and ideas of others is: “That’s interesting. Can you tell me how you arrived at that way of thinking? Can you walk me through the steps?” There should be a process they can identify. The steps should sound logical. If not, they’re regifting a belief. It isn’t theirs, and it wasn’t thought through. If they balk at answering you or they double-down on a hard-sell message, be wary.
• Keep your emotions in check. When you’re in a highly emotional state—angry at someone, attracted to someone, scared, moved by a poignant speech or passionate sermon—you are more susceptible to losing control of your logic and making poor decisions.
• Finally, know that if you have the personality type of being a pleaser or a “harmonizer,” you are especially at risk for conforming quickly, although, as we saw with Mike above, even strong, assertive people can be gullible at times.
Depending on the situation, our current mood, the internal physical state of our bodies, and our social needs at the moment, any of us can fall prey to gullibility. We all have the potential to lose a bit of our capacity to think independently around attractive, powerful, persuasive people. And again, groups have a strong gravitational pull all their own. Balance is key. We want to learn and grow from engaging with the world around us. We need to be part of the social fabric to be happy and healthy. And we all need the admiration and acceptance of others, but we must balance this with the need to hold on to the core parts of ourselves through not abdicating our commitment to think independently.
When Paul is conducting an executive assessment, a critical component is determining the role that beliefs play in the executive’s thinking process. Assessing the degree to which a leader’s belief system influences their ability to think logically and engage in situation analysis is essential given its importance to managerial success. Is the leader’s belief system well examined? Is there an appropriate level of intellectual humility present? Does this person have the ability to exercise flexibility in their beliefs, or are they rigidly and defensively held? Do they demonstrate a capacity to question their assumptions? Are they comfortable with ambiguity? Executives who are able to separate themselves from their beliefs and see them as “objects” outside of themselves are more likely to be flexible and objective thinkers and better leaders.
Paul’s Notes: Leader as Alienator
I asked my client, a CEO named Gary, to recount his initial meeting with his new team. He had retained me to help him improve the team’s morale, which at the time was quite negative. A high-energy, former college athlete now in his fifties, Gary’s leadership style ties directly to a set of beliefs about how best to motivate people. In particular, he believes that people perform best when under considerable tension and that it’s important to project strength and avoid any sign of caring too much about his direct reports. And so at that first meeting, he arrived a bit late, took a seat, opened his laptop, and started typing on the keyboard. People looked at one another in silence. They waited.
“Go ahead and start,” he instructed, lifting one hand from the keyboard and motioning but not looking up. “I can attend to this while listening to what you have to say.”
Gary was aware that the tension in the room had increased as his team reacted to his behavior. The unfortunate first impression he conveyed to his team was that they were not worth much, as he expressed so little interest in them. Although he intended to demonstrate how capable, tough, and independent he was—“There’s a new sheriff in town”—his actions instead communicated that he didn’t value them. Not surprisingly, morale plummeted.
This may seem like cartoonishly bad behavior, a sign of Gary’s total self-absorption and lack of EQ. But the reality is, we are all capable at times of being out of touch with what others require from us.
Beliefs and a defensive attitude were behind Jeff’s issues at work as well. Jeff, a high-octane executive with a first-rate analytical mind, was struggling mightily in his role with a large, highly successful technology company. The senior-most leaders who had embraced him when he joined the company four years earlier had begun to see him as difficult to work with. Puzzled by this turn of events, Jeff reached out for help from an executive coach. It came out in the initial assessment and subsequent meetings that Jeff carried around a rigidly held set of unreasonable beliefs regarding his expectations of the company’s senior leaders. In his view, most were falling seriously short of meeting these standards. This generated a lot of strong feelings on Jeff’s part, chief among them anger and resentment, which occasionally seeped out in dramatic ways in his interactions with them. The group of senior leaders, in turn, found Jeff to be preachy, self-preoccupied, highly judgmental, and even, on occasion, arrogant—hence the “difficult” label that was attached to him.
As Jeff continued to talk and reflect about his situation, some insights began to emerge. First, he realized that his beliefs about this group of leaders were largely untested, as he had not tried to get to know any of them on a deeper level. Second, he was able to see that his own extreme competitiveness led him to compare himself to them at every turn and overemphasize their shortcomings. Ironically, he was able to acknowledge, with some prodding, that he wanted more than anything to be regarded highly enough by this group to become a member of the senior team! In taking corrective action, he made the decision to deepen his connection to several members within this group by becoming more curious about their thoughts on the business and what they were most concerned about. Focusing on this helped him keep his competitiveness in check and to more fully enter into their world. While still a work in progress, Jeff has developed closer working relationships with a few of the senior leaders, and they have become more supportive of him and his efforts. He is feeling more supported and optimistic about his future prospects with the organization.
Be Tough-Minded and Transparent as You Adopt Your Own Beliefs
If left unchecked, erroneous beliefs can misinform and lead us down destructive paths.
The scientific evidence is strong. More than fifty years of psychological research tells us that rational, reasonable thought is not our default way of thinking—we must work to achieve it. We’re more emotionally driven and must question our beliefs and regulate strong emotions to ensure we are thinking clearly. It can be mentally fatiguing to do this, as it takes time and requires significant energy.
Consider this analogy—it’s as if we keep reaching for and wearing whatever beliefs we have hanging in our mental closets, through every season and for all occasions, no matter how they fit, no matter how odd they may look to others or out of date they’ve become. Think of this analogy the next time you balk at updating your point of view or challenging your beliefs!
Some suggestions:
• Listen to other people’s beliefs, but be skeptical when they’re presented as self-evident truths, absolutes, or are abstractions wrapped in powerful emotions that feel difficult to question.
• Be aware of manipulation. Sophisticated media delivery systems pitch to the emotional centers of our brains routinely. While people always have been manipulated, today it’s much more frequent and powerful.
• Be aware of the physical state of your body. When feeling tired or stressed, you can be more apt to adopt prevailing views uncritically. Recognize this as a point of vulnerability.
• Be aware of beliefs pitched and pushed on you. Propaganda works this way, and it can be seductively powerful. Mixing truth and fiction and charging up your emotions can influence you to abandon independent thinking and act against your own interests.
• Adopt beliefs only after thought and reflection. Don’t fall into the trap of copying and downloading other people’s beliefs (even if you admire these people). Instead, while keeping an open mind and listening to others, build and update your opinions and beliefs.
Throughout your waking day, you’re constantly assembling perceptions and judgments of other people’s behavior—provisional constructs to help you make sense of your world and guide your actions. Some of these beliefs are more accurate than others, many are distorted, and most are incomplete and not well-considered. If you are unaware of this, your level of agency is reduced.
Among the many places you can run into trouble with this is when something goes wrong, when a mistake is made—particularly when it is you who made the mistake. When this occurs, there is a marked human tendency to point the finger elsewhere—to justify one’s actions and avoid taking responsibility, sometimes at all costs. According to social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, in their book appropriately titled Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), “We each draw our own moral lines and justify them (emphasis added).” This should give us all pause. Knowing that we’re in the right isn’t as obvious and easy to determine as we may think.
This is where the capacity to step back and reflect can be of tremendous help to you. Keep a watchful eye on the biases that lead to blaming others and relinquishing personal accountability. Take responsibility, own up to your errors, and apologize when it’s called for. And commit yourself to learning from these mistakes. It enhances agency. Tavris and Aronson give a great historical example, noting that after the disastrous Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion in the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy said to the American people, “The final responsibility for the Bay of Pigs invasion was mine and mine alone.”
On a more personal level, think for a moment if you could remove the weight of all the blame and malign motives you assign to people around you. There is genuine freedom and, yes, agency in reminding yourself to do this whenever possible.
Erik is a young man from Seattle in his early thirties who describes himself as a true romantic. A part-time musician and full-time graphic artist, he uses his rich emotional inner life to create. He’s sensitive, empathetic, and imaginative—all wonderful qualities—but strong emotions are sabotaging what he wants most in life: to fall in love and settle down. Attractive and highly social, he has no trouble meeting women to date, but his high emotions often cause him to overthink even the smallest of social interactions. Why didn’t she text me back right away? Maybe I should ask my friend what I should do next. I’ll be alone forever if I don’t find the right one soon. In his personal life, Erik is insecure and indecisive, while professionally he can get on a stage, appear in front of an audience, and play music with confidence. On the outside, he looks like he’s got it all. Inside, he’s secretly suffering.
The reason? Erik carries around an underlying belief that generates ongoing anxiety. Erik believes he won’t be happy until he finds his perfect soul mate, his one and only life partner. This is a belief that doesn’t provide Erik much perceived control.
As soon as he meets a woman he would like to ask out, Erik unconsciously starts working to fit her into his rigid, unrealistic, one-and-only ideal of what love is supposed to be. He spends a lot of time analyzing and worrying about everything that could go wrong rather than living in the moment, exploring, enjoying where the new relationship might lead. His belief that he must find his one and only soul mate generates so much anxiety that Erik often moves in too quickly at times and pulls back suddenly at others. It causes him to send very mixed signals to women, that he’s either not interested, ambivalent, judgmental, or desperate. Most women stop wanting to see him after a short time.
Until Erik acknowledges and updates his belief, he’s unlikely to better regulate his feelings and get his anxiety under control. He goes through frequent periods where he smokes pot to reduce his anxiety. This works in the short term, but symptom management accomplishes little because he soon repeats the same pattern. What would work better for him is to attack the belief head-on. Challenge it, stop it when it surfaces, and replace it with a more accurate belief, something like, There are many great people out there who could be a potential match for me. There’s no one person who determines my happiness. Adopting a more realistic belief would help Erik feel more in control of his life. It would help him keep his anxiety at bay so that when he meets someone he’s attracted to, he can be more himself by allowing his natural, fun-loving, romantic nature to shine through.
Having just heard about Erik, ask yourself how much control you believe you have over your world and over your happiness. Is it realistic to believe that you are, more than not, the master of your destiny and your well-being? How much control should you attempt to exert through your actions and in what circumstances?
Generally, people who have a sense that their actions have the power to change their lives for the better have more agency.
Psychologists employ a useful term called locus of control (LOC), basically a concept that defines whether an individual operates with the belief that their fate is largely determined by outside forces or whether they believe they personally have the wherewithal to create their own fate.
Do you know where you fall? Read the two statements below and select the one that you agree with most. Try not to overthink this simple exercise.
I have often found that what is going to happen will happen. Trusting to fate has never turned out as well for me as making a decision to take a definite course of action.
If you agree with the first statement, it suggests you may have an external LOC. The second statement suggests an internal LOC. People with an internal LOC operate with a stronger, more positive agency voice. They believe they can effect change in their lives and are more willing to exert effort to move themselves forward.
People who assume leadership roles generally have more internal LOC. They tend to see themselves as capable of acting on their environment. They tend to believe they have the right set of skills to do whatever their situation requires. Obviously, this doesn’t mean minimizing significant hurdles, but rather having the confidence to believe that, with thought and work, they can be overcome. It also means recognizing situations where ceding control is the best approach but doing so in a thoughtful way with a strategic purpose in mind.
While having an internal LOC promotes personal agency, there is a point of diminishing returns—think control freak. If you have a super-high internal LOC, you may not cede control when it makes best sense to do so. In short, don’t attempt to overcontrol; simply lead with a belief that much is within your means to influence and it is worth the effort to try.
Staying flexible with your locus of control is key. If you have an extremely high internal LOC and are rigid and overcontrolling, you can practice giving up control in small increments. See how it feels. This teaches your brain that the world doesn’t come to an end if you trust others more or relax and trust a process to work itself out. It is not useful to try to manage things that are truly beyond your reach. If you have an extremely high external LOC, you need to realize that you’re ceding too much control to others or to fate. Practice stepping up and being less passive. Express your opinions more. Make an effort to take more control, no matter how small. Don’t automatically give in and go along with what life hands you.
One more important point. Stepping up—being an active agent in your life—allows you to exert better control over what you feel. We’ve known about the connection between actions and emotions for over a hundred years. Still, most of us don’t fully recognize the connection between our feelings (which are nearly impossible to control) and our actions (which are almost always in our conscious control). This is reflected in the wise words of William James, referred to as the father of American psychology:
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
Develop Your Own Personal Power Images
The image of yourself in your head has a very real impact. Engaging your imagination—using power images—is a mental action you can voluntarily take any time you want to enhance your self-efficacy.
The goal of this technique is to see yourself acting in a powerful way through an image that is personal to you. Next time you notice yourself daydreaming, you may discover that your mind has already invented an alternative reality—a positive, short movie-like clip—it’s your creative imagination at work allowing you to escape boredom, frustration, or fear. Home in on this natural imaginative skill and bring it forth whenever you are feeling overwhelmed. In doing so, you can simulate successfully addressing a challenging situation by envisioning yourself acting to address it. This can improve your confidence and improve your performance when you must put your intentions into action. Often when people with agency look back on their early years, they report how important early power images were in preparing them to get to where they wanted to be. Power images are a tool allowing you to envision what a strong internal locus of control actually looks like when applied in your situation.
One study nicely illustrates the point. It asked a group of healthy, nondepressed women to close their eyes and focus on either sad or happy events from their real lives. The researchers observed distinct measurable changes in their brains on a PET scan. The lesson here is that you may be depressed (which is one of the lowest states of agency you can be in) not because your brain is wired that way but because you may be holding on to negative images, thoughts, and memories. Those ideas will send the brain moving down self-defeating paths, generating helplessness and hopelessness. Using power images can help to reverse this.
We often ask our clients to do a short exercise in which they move to a quiet place where they can reflect without interruption. They think about how the world works and their place in it, and they write down whatever comes to mind. Here are some examples of the kinds of responses we typically get:
It’s impossible to keep up …
It’s a dog-eat-dog world we live in …
In this world, good things come to those who wait …
Things always work out the way they’re meant to …
Politicians are all liars and schemers …
It is always best not to rely on others too much …
Now, write a few of your thoughts and beliefs down and say them out loud, and compare them in tone to those above. Note the degree to which none of these statements is provably right or wrong—that’s what makes them beliefs; they are subjective statements. Further, note how strongly worded or rigid they are, using words like always, all, and best, which implies that they are somehow immutable laws of science rather than beliefs.
We suggest that they (and you) take a different approach to thinking about the world, one that allows a bit more flexibility and precision. Instead of “It’s a dog-eat-dog world we live in,” how about “There are supportive, warmhearted people as well as coldhearted, selfish people in the world.” The key is to allow for more variation and less rigidity. This usually reflects reality more accurately.
Sometimes we are forced to update our beliefs after facing serious life events that might have been avoided. Our beliefs, left unchecked, can railroad us unintentionally onto harmful paths.
Brad started a drapery business with his wife, Pamela, in southwest Florida in the early 2000s, during an economy that was booming. They worked hard and took advantage of opportunities that came their way and were initially quite successful. The power of their success was infectious. Brad and Pamela bought a second property, then a third. They expanded their business and started dabbling in the stock market. “We started to feel that we were special, uniquely talented at what we did, and that we deserved all our success and that it would go on forever, but, looking back, everyone was doing great in those times,” Brad told us.
Their belief about success wasn’t based on a fanciful childhood fairy tale, although it did come to have the sound of wishful, almost magical thinking. It was fueled in part by the positive psychology movement that became popularized in the 1990s and was widely marketed in highly misleading, unscientific ways. Books, videos, and inspirational and motivational speakers flooded the market with promises of fast happiness and easy success. If you want it, it will come. Believe in yourself and you will become rich and live the life of your dreams. The secret is just to think positively! As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats, and while the tide was in, all went swimmingly.
But boats also eventually sink when the tide goes out. When the Great Recession of 2008 hit, Brad and Pamela had to face their beliefs about success and adjust to the realities of a radically different, unforgiving economy. “We lost everything,” Brad said. “It wasn’t that we were especially talented or gifted at making money. We got caught up in the times. Had we seen things more realistically, we could have saved, not overinvested, and prepared for the eventual downturn.”
Brad and Pamela weren’t alone. Millions of people suffered foreclosures on their homes, lost their savings, and had to start over in the Great Recession. The depth of the downturn was exacerbated, if not caused, by greed and willful ignorance at the highest levels of business and government, including predatory lending practices and insufficient consumer protections, and yet, the signs of the excesses were there for anyone to see. Economic cycles are a well-known economic reality, but our beliefs can be blinding. They recruit our emotions and sometimes can function as a narcotic, offering us a false sense of euphoria. Again, beliefs must be examined and squared against what’s actually occurring. Stay open to learning. Strive to be a perceptive person. Listen to a range of news sources. Don’t surround yourself only with information sources or other people that confirm all your beliefs, because it leaves you vulnerable.
Back to your list of beliefs. What does your list of beliefs say about your worldview? Can you figure out where your beliefs originated? Your parents? Your upbringing or town or community? The times in which you grew up? A particularly formative experience? Many typically come from people who made a strong impression on you at a younger age.
Use Your Agency: Scrutinize your ideas and beliefs. Expose them to the logic of others. Check your facts and pay attention to the reputation and accuracy of the sources you consult. It forms the basis for all good decision-making.
Recognize that it’s impossible for your beliefs to apply all the time and to every situation. Recognize their limitations and how, at times, they can be flat-out wrong. Try to widen or stretch your beliefs. By that, we mean make them more flexible and able to accommodate a wider range of real situations.
This isn’t easy. Most difficult to challenge are core beliefs. These are basic beliefs about the world, about others, and about oneself, that are usually formed in childhood. They are constantly influencing us—shaping us—and they can be highly resistant to change. Again, we tend to adopt most of our beliefs uncritically, even automatically; it’s as if they come in through the back door in the dead of night while we are sound asleep! Scribing them onto paper or even stating them out loud so you can hear how extreme and potentially distorted they are is a great first step toward consciously managing them.
There is a distinction between your beliefs and your values. Values are things we hold to be universal and unchanging as they apply very widely. They can often be found in familiar sayings and proverbs: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Honesty is the best policy. Winners never cheat, and cheaters never win. Values are useful guideposts for us to hold on to in terms of what is right, good, and what matters most. They inform our thinking, decisions, and our actions.
Beliefs, however, are often more specific—Chevrolets are the best automobiles—and reflect information we have or what we are aware of at a given time. They are much more similar to opinions but are often treated as unchanging values. When beliefs are held as firmly as values, it can make us highly emotional and play to our tribal tendencies. Democrats/Republicans are anti-American. People in religion X are all terrorists. There are many ways to understand political viewpoints, for example, and to appreciate and respect other religions.
As we touched on earlier, inspirational stories by confident, successful people telling us it’s possible to be anything we want, have anything we want—Believe it and it will happen—sometimes do us a disservice. Everyone enjoys feeling inspired by others, and we all seek out people and stories to motivate us—this book has its fair share of motivational anecdotes—but if you really want to build agency and make gains in your life, it won’t happen through mindlessly embracing positive thinking and affirmations alone. Inspiration is only a starting point, a way to motivate yourself into action and change—you must figure out a path to action that works for you. From developing a career, to deciding whom to marry, to planning for retirement, you have to put in the time and energy to think carefully through the details and about what will realistically be required.
And to some degree, this warning applies to our faith as well. There are wonderful, deeply meaningful spiritual benefits that faith offers us. There are health benefits to religious practices, as Vanderbilt University researchers recently reported. They found that regular attendance at worship services reduced stress and likely helped middle-aged men and women live longer, according to their study published in 2017. Even the most faithful and spiritual among us, however, understand that we must strive to be autonomous and self-reliant when it makes sense to do so. God helps those who help themselves. It’s a reminder that we have within us the power to initiate, to think for ourselves, to tap into our potential and make positive life changes.
“I get lost in the abyss of my mind,” Alan told us. “It’s like being one of the prisoners in Plato’s cave, chained to rocks.”
Alan is an engaging young man in his mid-twenties with a wide, inviting smile. You’d never know that beneath his jovial façade he’s obsessively focusing on details that aren’t important. It’s dominating his life at times. He was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and has been treated with medications and therapy on and off since age twelve. The OCD comes and goes, peaking when he’s stressed.
Speaking with Alan was a great opportunity to test one of our strategies that we call taking the big-picture view.
Taking a step back and looking at the big picture was impossible for Alan when his OCD was flaring up. When anxiety occurs, your brain goes on high alert, even though there’s rarely anything to be fearful about. Haven’t you experienced this when you worry? You start focusing on small things, details. That’s because small things might matter when you are in real danger. While your mind is hunting for potential threats, it fails to see the larger landscape that would calm you, prove that you are fine, in fact. Let’s show you how this works by walking you through the technique we used with Alan, a fun, imagination-based technique that you can use anytime you feel anxiety rising and find yourself focusing on meaningless details.
First, we asked Alan what he meant when he said he was like a prisoner in Plato’s cave. “My eyes are looking inward,” he explained. “Like there’s a cave wall, right? And my worries are the shadows reflected up on it. I know my thoughts mean nothing—but I can’t stop focusing on them. I can’t turn around and look out of the cave and see what is real. It drives me crazy.” Alan also described his mind as, at times, like having CNN running over and over in his thoughts. It’s like breaking news blaring at him every waking moment, but the news flashes are all highly unlikely things that could go wrong in his life. “It’s so annoying,” he said, shaking his head.
Alan is a highly visual person as evidenced by his descriptions of what he’s seeing in his head. We decided to take advantage of that strength. If you’re also a very visual person, consider guided-imagery techniques to substitute obsessive worries with pleasing and positive scenes under your control. Our coaching of Alan went something like what you see in the box that follows.
The Powerful Technique of Guided Imagery
Guided imagery is a tool that opens up possibilities and promotes agency (it’s related to power images). It’s all done in your head with your eyes closed, and you are typically guided by a script. It is commonly used in sports psychology to enhance athletic performance. It is often used to help people relax their bodies, reduce their anxiety, and achieve a grounded mental state. In its more complex application, people can be trained to envision different scenes where they are encountering a challenge or significant fear and watching themselves successfully moving toward better outcomes.
To understand its power, consider this simple guided-imagery exercise we used with Alan, who struggles with obsessive thoughts and worries that are getting in his way. It was an exercise to teach him how to shift perspective away from what was bothering him.
Start off with getting to a quiet place, sit or recline, and, if possible, record these words so that you can listen with your eyes closed:
See yourself lying in a field, and your head is turned toward the grass—you’re staring at a bee moving around a flower. It’s close to you. You’re looking right at the stinger. You feel fear, right? Who wouldn’t? Now, pick up your head. See yourself getting to your knees. Stay looking at that bee, but the stinger starts to become blurred, fades away. Now another step back, then another. The bee and that flower blend into a patch of colorful flowers. You keep walking backward—like a camera moving back—until the field resembles a Monet painting with blurred pleasant yellows dabbled with violet, red, and orange, and soon you see hills and a clear blue sky in the distance. Imagine the pleasant scent of those wildflowers. Imagine feeling a cool, gentle breeze on your skin. That bee and that stinger are still in that field, but you know they can’t hurt you. They don’t register anymore. It’s only one of many tiny details that don’t matter in the big picture.
With practice, use that series of images to prove to your mind that you can mentally step back from any unwanted thought or belief anytime you want.
Your imagination can help you visualize yourself a day, a week, six weeks, six months, a year into the future. This is valuable as a tool because the magnitude of today’s circumstances diminish when we project ourselves forward in time. Circumstances often don’t feel as stressful when we consider them down the road.
Take this a step further to enhance your agency. Visualize yourself in a situation requiring high-performance. Envision your potential struggles and obstacles, but always end up with a great outcome. Try on a few power images for size just to see what your mind invents. Be playful with the exercise. Always see yourself succeeding.
In time, you’ll be more comfortable with the possibility of making changes and taking on something new. First time up on a surfboard? Teaching your son or daughter to dive? Nailing an interview or landing an account or winning over a new client? Envision the challenge before trying the real thing. See yourself sticking to it, and make sure your image includes seeing yourself relaxed and proudly smiling.
Psychotherapy can be an excellent way to enhance your skill at managing emotions and beliefs as you work at expanding your personal agency. There are many different forms of therapy. Two approaches will be discussed here—cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic psychotherapy. Both have strong theoretical underpinnings, have well-researched outcome studies, and have been around for decades. In some ways, they are opposite approaches but are complementary as well.
CBT, first introduced in the 1960s, was pioneered by the psychiatrist Dr. Aaron T. Beck at the University of Pennsylvania. CBT is usually brief; it’s about managing symptoms, getting to goals through controlling how you behave, changing the environment around you, and digging deep to change negative thought patterns. Many of our principles overlap with this approach, but you’d be missing great opportunities to build agency if you thought CBT was the only valid approach.
Psychodynamic forms of therapy tend to be more open-ended, more exploratory, and seek to find deeper meaning in your life from delving into your memories, your history, all your life experiences that may have meaning. This allows you to construct an overall narrative of your life that can be uniquely valuable.
If you’re feeling stuck in a difficult place and considering psychotherapy, it’s good not to wait. This is especially true if you are experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression, having trouble sleeping, relying heavily on drugs or alcohol to cope, or having anger outbursts, eating issues, or any number of problems that feel beyond your ability to control and are interfering with living your life as you want. We recommend you check with friends, family, or a trusted medical provider for a referral. You can then meet with a few therapists to see who you feel most comfortable with, of course selecting practitioners first for their qualifications and experience. You should feel connected and heard and want to return. Usually one or two meetings is enough to know if this is the right person for you, but don’t rush to judgment either. Engage with them and be open. Ask them about themselves, their work experience, and what they think would be the best way to proceed after you’ve discussed your challenges.
Psychotherapy: The Underutilized Tool
Most people who could benefit from psychotherapy don’t go. Reasons include accessibility to practitioners, insurance hurdles, costs in time and money, and the perceived stigma of seeking help for emotional problems.
The “worried well,” as we like to call them, are people like our clients who are generally high-achieving, high-functioning, and living full, busy lives. Many do not need therapy in a formal, clinical sense, but they do benefit greatly from seeing a trained mental health professional from time to time—a mind coach of sorts—to help them manage their emotions and beliefs. When clinically indicated, we recommend longer-term psychotherapies, and in more severe situations, a medication consult in addition.
Maintaining balanced emotions and realistic beliefs is key to a productive life no matter who you are. It was psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud who noted that people depend on the capacity to work and the capacity to love (writing, in Civilization and Its Discontents, that “the communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love”). If you’re not adequately managing your emotions and beliefs, your capacities for both work and love will be compromised.
Mindfulness is another huge go-to approach with tremendous therapeutic benefits that we recommend. This includes the Buddhist practice of slowing things down and centering yourself through meditation. Again, it is also critical to focus on your body’s needs. Nutrition, sleep, rest, respecting your body (as discussed in chapter 3), and engaging in regular healthy movement and outdoor activity will balance your neurochemistry and help you to manage your emotions.
Whether you enter into therapy or not, we recommend that you use any and all strategies to maintain healthy control over the feelings and thoughts in your mind. This, along with a body in a state of healthy physical balance, helps build your capacity for reasonable, intentional, planful thinking. A mind in balance is primed for extended thought, allowing you to analyze, use logic, and apply critical thinking to arrive at a good understanding of any issue—using your acquired insight to generate options, which you can then act on with full agency.
And it could lengthen your life. You’ve likely heard of the positive psychology movement and its many benefits. A study published 2016 in The Journals of Gerontology by researchers at Yale School of Public Health found that positive self-perceptions of getting older among people fifty years and up was related to living longer. The positive beliefs seemed to be a factor in helping lower stress-related inflammation. Why this happens isn’t fully understood, and it likely isn’t as simple as inserting a positive thought here and there into one’s day. That may not be enough. Rather, it’s more about maintaining a balanced, realistic view of everything, making sure that what is good in your life isn’t being forgotten or eclipsed by distorted thinking and patterns of negative feelings.
People are working with different neurosystems, different hormone levels, different energy levels, and different life and cultural experiences that shape their feelings and thinking patterns. We each have different capabilities for dealing with strong emotions, and those capabilities may be stronger or weaker on any given day depending on how much sleep we’ve gotten, what kind of diet we’ve been eating, how many responsibilities and worries we’re carrying. We point all this out to highlight the fact that you shouldn’t make too much of any one feeling, thought, or belief, nor should you judge others as wrong because they respond differently to something or hold a different opinion.
Assessments such as the Strong Interest Inventory, 16pf (16 personality factors), Enneagram, and DISC Assessment (Decisiveness, Interactiveness, Stability, Cautiousness), just to name a few, are often used in organizational settings to facilitate personal discovery and self-awareness. No two people taking these type assessments are likely to come out exactly the same. This highlights the fact that we are all quite unique. Be open to this and keep learning about yourself; keep developing greater self-awareness.
Novelist and essayist Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We all maintain a story line of our lives in order to comprehend and manage the world we live in. Beliefs, like emotions, are best when not fixed, but rather when they are allowed to evolve. The problem comes when we hold on to them as if they are synonymous with our identities—I am my beliefs.
Again, high-agency people use their beliefs as temporary guides to help them navigate as they gain experience and new learning. They distinguish their beliefs from the core principles and values they hold. They allow their beliefs to evolve as they learn. They are comfortable with ambiguity. They stay open to questioning their beliefs on a regular basis, understanding that both beliefs and emotions are cognitions separate from who they really are deep inside. This process allows them to keep their core values intact while they integrate real-life experiences and update what they know, becoming more perceptive and nuanced decision-makers. All of this allows them to face new situations squarely through being more aware of their assumptions.
In many respects, this is the most challenging of the seven principles we detail in this book, but it’s also the most rewarding for the clarity it will give you. As you become more skillful with the principle, you’ll see the path ahead of you clearly and better know the direction in which you need to go.
YOUR AGENCY TOOL KIT
BE CLEAR: Distinguish between your values (universal) and beliefs (flexible in response to real evidence).
MONITOR EMOTIONS: Identify your feelings, recognize their value, and express them at the right time, in the right situation, and with the right level of intensity.
THEN, LET THEM GO: Don’t fixate on your emotions: Talk them out, focus on your breath, meditate, and use other mind-body techniques to let them go.
PUT NAMES TO THEM: Name your strong emotions, worries, and negative beliefs to make them easier to manage.
EXPAND YOUR EMOTIONAL VOCABULARY: Work at more precisely defining your feelings and putting words to them.
PULL BACK: Practice pulling back your lens to shift your view to the broader landscape—it will protect you from getting caught up in minutiae.
CHANNEL ADRENALINE: Channel the adrenaline that fuels negative reactions by using power images, healthy movement, and other mind-body techniques.
TAKE CONTROL: Fight misperceptions that you aren’t an active agent making your life happen—instead, for each situation, know how much control actually resides within you.
KNOW YOUR SINKHOLES: Be alert to patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that cause you to get stuck in “old, familiar places” pulling you down, sinking your confidence and resilience.
QUESTION ASSUMPTIONS: Challenge the assumptions you operate with—young people are apathetic … expensive wine always tastes better—it sets the stage for effective critical thinking and opens you up to trying new things.