“You are allowing the system to define you.”
These were the words spoken to me, with great love and truth, in the midst of a significant leadership challenge I was facing.
I looked at my friend and colleague, an Anglican priest with a background in family systems, and thought, “What in the world is he talking about?”
Over the next several months, he helped me to see that the emotional system I was a part of was compelling me to be someone I was not, stuck in unhealthy patterns, so that the system itself would not to have to change.
Edwin Friedman, in his landmark book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix describes it this way:
“I want to stress that by well-differentiated leader I do not mean an autocrat who tells others what to do or orders them around, although any leader who defines himself or herself clearly may be perceived that way by those who are not taking responsibility for their own emotional being and destiny. Rather, I mean someone who has clarity about his or her own life goals and, therefore, someone who is less likely to become lost in the anxious emotional processes swirling about. I mean someone who can be separate while still remaining connected and, therefore, can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence. I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity in response to the automatic reactivity of others and, therefore, be able to take stands at the risk of displeasing. It is not as though some leaders can do this and some cannot. No one does this easily, and most leaders, I have learned, can improve their capacity.”
And so, began a journey for me that has taken over 7 years and is not yet done. The journey to become a non-anxious presence, one who is not easily jostled by the reactivity of the systems I am a part of or that I am serving. This is not a way to suppress or ignore our emotions, rather exactly the opposite. It is a journey towards emotional wholeness, maturity and integrity.
Emotional maturity is not simply understanding our feelings and emotions, but rather is the ability to see the systems we are a part of in order to recognize where they are healthy, non-anxious and responsive, and where they have become reactive, unhealthy and highly anxious. The well-defined and emotionally mature leader can engage in all parts of the system without enmeshing in its dysfunction or indulging the temptation to disengage completely. She stands firm and clear about who she is, without reacting to the anxiety.
Friedman defines emotional maturity as “the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny.”
He goes onto say that most people view leadership as a cognitive phenomenon—what do we need to know to be an effective leader, what I often call the ‘tips and trick’ or the ‘methods and techniques’ approach to leadership; but in reality, true leadership is an emotional process and leaders must be willing to do some very hard work to grow and become increasingly emotionally healthy and mature, to become well defined.
Integrity in the work of emotionally healthy systems is not less than doing the right thing or being honest or moral although this work does include and lead to both of these things, but rather is it is the work of integration, of wholeness. Bringing our emotional beings into coherence with our mental, physical and spiritual beings.
My own journey towards wholeness has been lifelong, but it is only in the last few years that I have finally made real progress. And I have not done it alone, but with the help of a good therapist, an executive coach and some very good friends. I am now standing more firmly grounded and well defined in who I am and how I am made to lead and work.
I left the organization that was pressing me to remain in an emotionally unhealthy place. It was very hard and required real fortitude for me to step away, when my (unhealthy) pattern had always been to stay and rescue. But I did it. And my work now is entirely focused on helping others- both individuals and organizations -become emotionally healthy and well defined, to become increasingly coherent and integrated.
We live in a highly anxious time, especially in our country right now. Everywhere we turn, there are forces trying to define us and conform us to unhealthy emotional systems, whether in our families, our workplaces, our communities or our public lives.
The Apostle Paul (a very well-defined leader himself) tells us differently. In his letter to the church of Rome. He says it this way:
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.”
Romans 12:2-3
He is counseling us to ‘think of ourselves with sober judgement’- not too highly, but not too lowly either. And to define ourselves well to the anxious world from a place of calm and presence, and not conform to it.
This journey towards wholeness is not for the faint of heart. I have found that many leaders do not wish to undertake it because addressing their emotional selves and and the emotional systems at play in their organizations feels messy, scary and even unnecessary. But when they come to a place of real pain and suffering, a place where what they know is no longer serving them and they find themselves dis-integrating, they may be ready to reach out for help. Where are you in your journey towards emotional health and creating emotionally healthy organizations?
Tamim Partners is here to walk with you as you navigate this journey. And it may well be the most important journey of your life.
Email lisa@tamimpartners.com if you’d like to explore how we work.