New Rules
Transformation is seductive, isn't it?
We’re all attracted to the idea of becoming someone or something quite different.
Of changing from the caterpillar to the butterfly. Leaving behind our ugly, clumsy, awkward current selves and emerging as something beautiful, graceful and new.
The idea of wiping the slate clean and starting again is beguiling, exciting and, frankly, a relief.
That’s why we sign up to the courses to “Create the ‘New You’!”. That’s why we want to work with ‘Transformational coaches’.
But I don’t think this is at all helpful. It’s the silver bullet of personal development. A chimera of change, as insubstantial as a morning mist.
That’s not how change happens, most of the time. Change is a constant trudge, fumbling through the fog, struggling to find your bearings and unsure whether your are coming or going. Quite often, the moment of change happens when you aren’t paying attention and you don’t notice it until later, like when you realise it’s been a couple of weeks since you had those unhelpful thoughts or succumbed to that unhelpful behaviour - and it’s truly behind you.
Transformation doesn’t happen like a bolt of lightening but more like a slow maturing of a bottle of wine. You create the most conducive conditions, and then you mostly leave it alone. You focus on maintaining the conditions, only checking the wine periodically. Then one day you check it and you think, ‘Oh, it’s ready to drink now’.
When we leave the corporate bubble, we have to change because our situation has changed. That’s something that has happened to most of us during our corporate career, as we changed companies or roles, but it wasn’t quite as marked and we saw it more as a progression rather than the phase shift we face now.
So we feel we have to ‘reinvent’ ourselves, to create a ‘new you’ for ourselves. We forget all the previous changes we’ve been through and we look for the magic silver bullet that is going to make us ‘fit into’ the new context we find ourselves in.
That’s the wrong approach and is doomed to failure (trust me, I’ve tried it!) but we run towards it because it promises, in one leap, to take away our pain. Perhaps a ‘magic pill’ is a better description.
You don’t need to create the ‘new you’. You need to find the ‘old you’ because that is what will take the pain away.
That pain is caused by separation from your yourself. Over the years you’ve spent in the corporate madhouse you have been forced to change, to put on armour to protect yourself from attacks, to put on masks to hide and keep yourself safe. However, the armour stops you from feeling and the masks stop you (and others) from seeing yourself. You get so detached from you, you’ve forgotten who you are.
So it’s really unhelpful to think that you need to find some new armour and some new masks to ‘transform’ yourself.
It’s not about adding anything. It’s about discarding what’s been built up; the layers of armour, the array of masks. It’s not about discovering new parts of yourself.
It’s about finding your way back home to you.
Underneath Your Clothes
Before you start to think I’m talking about returning to the ‘real you’ or the ‘authentic you’, I’m not. I don’t think such a singular identity exists. Such an idea is another silver bullet and looking to find it is a fool’s errand
I’m much more comfortable with the idea that we have multiple selves and we switch between them depending on the roles we are playing and the context we find ourselves in. I’m open to the idea that there’s some part of these multiple selves that is common but that is, by definition, undefinable and unknowable and so, ultimately, unhelpful as an idea. It’s comforting because it infers there is a coherence between my multiple selves, which is a good thing, but that’s all.
However, my earlier observation was that several years in the corporate madhouse causes you to create selves that are detached and disconnected from your other selves and that is what’s causing you pain. That suggests these selves do not have anything in common with the others and that feeling of coherence is lacking.
I also often make the point that the systems we work in promote psychopathic behaviours and cause good people to do bad things. It’s entirely possible (and you may have observed this in others, if not yourself) that the selves we create for work can be expressions of our shadow side, full of psychopathy, narcissism and machiavellianism.
We are often unaware, or unwilling to acknowledge, these darker selves. We rationalise them because that’s how we have to be to fit in and get on. “It’s just business, it’s not personal”, we tell ourselves. Only it is, it’s very personal. It creates a tension that we can’t release and that continues to grow. The very fact that these selves bring us success can increase the tension, and create a degree of self-loathing. This is not a good path to be on.
Of course, the opposite can also be true, that the selves we developed are a smaller version of who we think we are. As a defensive measure, we draw ourselves in and make ourselves a smaller target. We sense we are being less than we can be and that causes us to get frustrated and even depressed. We feel we should be having more impact but we are constrained from stepping up and speaking out because our passivity protects us.
I’m probably mangling this because I haven’t studied multiple self theory in any depth but my exploration here is to plant the idea that we have choice and agency about which selves we inhabit and develop. Our ‘corporate’ selves can often feel like constraints, a straightjacket that binds us tight and holds us in and that we can’t escape from. But we can. It’s only one of our selves. We can inhabit others, we can develop new selves. We can choose not to be that self anymore.
That’s what I think I mean by ‘coming home to you’. It’s stepping out of that corporate self (or selves) which has become dominant and spending more time in the selves you have neglected. It can be a lot harder than it sounds because those other selves feel odd and uncomfortable at first (after all, you might not have spent much time in them for several years) and you want to go back to the self you are most familiar with, even though you know it’s not good for you.
Those multiple selves offer possibility, however. You don’t have to stay where you are, things don’t have to be as they are.
Butterfly
Something else I believe is that change is an inside-out process. It begins with a stirring deep inside you, inside your soul. It depends on the degree of change as to how deep that feeling has to be but without, the change will be superficial and short-lived. That is, not transformational at all.
This is why most transformation projects in organisations fail. They have no connection with the inner lives of the people involved. In fact, quite often the people involved are barely consulted, much less engaged. They don’t need to feel the transformation project deeply - it’s only work, after all! But they do need to feel it connects with their hopes and aspirations, that it will positively impact them, that it’s meaningful to them.
When it comes to personal change, however, it does have to be felt deeply. I do mean felt, not thought. You can absolutely want to change, you can yearn to ‘be’ different to how you are right now but if you don’t feel that inner shift, you can’t get there.
I didn’t so much leave CorporateLand as fall out of it. It took me a while to recognise that I wasn’t going to go back in but when I did I had a very clear thought that I wanted to get back to 18-year old me. (On reflection, I changed this aspiration to 28-year old me because 18-year old me was a bit of a pillock! But the nostalgia was the same, back to a time when I felt more care-free, uninhibited, fun-loving and hopeful.)
I knew I wanted to make the necessary changes, to ‘transform’, if you like. I knew what I wanted my ‘new you’ to be like. But I was a million miles (and several years) away from getting there.
The place inside, where the change has to start, has proved a lot harder to reach than I ever imagined. It’s buried beneath all that armour and obscured by all those masks. It’s hidden behind fear, anxiety and insecurity. It’s been squeezed and crushed and holds a much smaller space than it used to. It’s a lot harder to connect to than it was when I was 28 - which is exactly why I want to get back to that time. Ironic, right?
So it takes a huge amount of of effort and conviction and courage - and a host of other resources. However, when you leave CorporateLand, resources are the very thing you are short of. Mine were very depleted when I left, drained away by several years of abuse and overburdening that had left me in poor mental health.
Today, many people would recognise this as burnout. I don’t think that exactly describes my experience but it does highlight the need for a period of recovery and replenishment of your resources. No, of course I didn’t do that! I reverted to my usual MO - denial, head down, push harder. It had been a successful strategy (sort of) earlier in my life but it wasn’t now.
So I’m still striving to connect to that inner point of change. That’s not to say I haven’t changed, I definitely have. A lot. But I’m not where I want to be yet.
Part of that process has been to shed some of my selves, which is trickier than you might think. Sometimes it’s through deliberate choice, sometimes through circumstances (becoming a grandfather, for example, has opened up bits of me I had almost forgotten about) but sometimes those less-welcome selves pop-up when you least expect them.
It’s a case of constant reflection, vigilance and effort. You have to do the work and it doesn’t stop. It’s a constant process. And, frankly, I’m lazy and so I sometimes stop doing what works and fall back into bad habits and, eventually, crisis. But I’m getting better at avoiding that.
Not exactly transformational, is it? Much as we might want to be the butterfly, emerging as a brilliant and dazzling new being from the pupae, each of our cells magically re-organised, the same but completely different - that’s not how it works.
We’re not butterflies, we don’t metamorphose. Besides, the adult butterfly only lives for a matter of weeks, a small part of it’s overall life cycle. Who wants to wait until they are near death to be magnificent?
Change is just a slow, constant becoming. Most of the time we aren’t paying attention to it. And then, we check in and we find the wine is ready for drinking.
HI Ho Silver Lining
There are no silver bullets.
Short-cuts are just dead-ends in disguise.
I’ve said these things many times. I believe most of the problems we face in our organisations, in our lives, are because we grasp at silver bullets and we search out apparent short-cuts. Instead, we have to take the time, do the work and trust the process. And accept the outcomes with equanimity because we did the things we can control properly.
And yet…
I’ve grabbed plenty of ‘silver bullets’ and run down plenty of apparent short-cuts, as I’ve already admitted. Because change is hard and needs consistent work and I am lazy. When I am tired and my resources are depleted (probably because I’ve stopped doing the things that replenish them - doh!) it’s so tempting to try them.
And to be fair, the people that sell the silver bullets and short-cuts are very skilled at selling them and know just what psychological and emotional buttons to press.
They use fancy words. Like ‘transformational’. 😉
I used to beat myself up about this. I used to berate myself for being lazy. I used to lambast myself for being so susceptible to the bullshit, for being so weak.
But I don’t do that anymore because I have accepted that I am a fallible human being like everyone else on the planet. I have accepted that progress is never a straight line and there are setbacks along the way, that there will be ups and downs, good days and bad days (and months, maybe even years).
So don’t beat yourself up either. We all in struggle and we all make mistakes. But I believe we are fundamentally good at heart and we can be better. And we can change.
It’s not about the big event or the moment of change, though. It’s about the direction of travel. As long as we are pushing in the right direction, we’re doing OK.
And most of the time, OK is good enough.
It does feel a lot like remembering. Digging out a part of you from younger years that brings flow or joy. It takes time and patience is is not linear as you’ve pointed out, but well worth the quest. It’s more archeology than Indiana Jones :-).
Sometimes integration - the return to home, the unlearning, the standing in our truths and the sheer will not to be moulded by others - is a transformation in and of itself. We don’t have to travel anywhere - physically or metaphorically - to integrate back into our various selves and become truly comfortable in our own skin.