Your Pathology is Part of the Illusion

When someone chooses to come to leadership coaching of their own accord, they typically come with a list of things they want to improve. The first conversation we have tends to be focused on introducing me to their List. The list of things that are wrong, that need their attention and effort. While these words are almost never uttered, there’s an underlying sentiment of, “please fix me!”

I almost feel guilty when over the next few months, most of what we explore is the idea that whatever pathology they think they have, it’s part of the grand illusion. And what is real and offers limitless calm, creativity and contentment is waking up to life.

This is not some kind of pollyanna way of looking at things. It’s seeing things for what they are, uncovering the truth behind life and applying it to leadership in a way that is perhaps uncommon, but quite helpful.

Now this may seems a bit too spiritual for business and leadership.

But let’s take a closure look.

When it comes to the List, where is the pathology? Where is whatever you believe is your issue - the thing that is holding you back or making you feel crappy?

Can you see it, feel it, touch it?

You can’t. That’s because whatever pathology you think you have, it can only exist in your mind as a memory. It happened in the past and because we perceive it as an issue, we find ample evidence of it.

This is due to our mind’s ability for pattern recognition. Our mind allows us to create patterns in our mind, even though in reality there are no patterns, there is only what happens now, and now, and now… a string of nows is the fabric of life.

But let’s take patterns as a thing that actually exists, at least in our minds eye, how accurate are they? Can we trust our perception of them?

I say no. Mostly, because those perceptions change moment to moment. Sometimes our patterns (or habits as they are often called) are these huge things that WE. MUST. CHANGE. And other times they’re simply not that bad or not an issue at all.

Imagine a glass elevator. On the ground floor garbage on the street looks like a big issue and an example of what is wrong in the world, but the higher the elevator climbs, the smaller the garbage looks until it ultimately disappears and our perception expands to something greater.

That’s how our pathology list works.

Why? Because it’s all based on thought and thought is variable. We can argue that it’s the biggest problem of our lives as passionately as we argue that it’s no issue at all.

That doesn’t mean that you haven’t done something multiple times in the past, it simply means that your perception of it is variable based on what you happen to be putting your awareness on.

And this is good to see because we attach so tightly to what is wrong with us and our mind innocently offers up multiple examples of how terrible things are, but it’s not true and it’s not to be trusted.

Think of the last time you sent a text message and didn’t get a reply right away. What patterns did your mind come up with to make sense of the non response? Likely a bunch of them. Your mind naturally makes sense of things in the absence of facts. And according to studies done on split-brain patients with severed corpus callosums, the mind is less concerned with accuracy and much more concerned with having some kind of story to answer its questions.

So, while there may be things on your list of pathologies that you genuinely want to change, the story you tell yourself about how bad it is and the consequences that are sure to happen if things don’t shift, are mostly false, and that’s good to see!

Let’s make this real with an example from a former client.

An executive at a large manufacturing company came for coaching because his team found him to be cold, short and irritable. Despite the respect they had for his intellect and capabilities, they found him hard to work with.

Now is this real? Well, yes and no.

Yes, in that the feedback was his team’s assessment of his leadership. The team, it’s safe to say, was offering their honest input on their experience with this leader.

And is it an absolute assessment? Of course not. This leader is not only cold, short and irritable - he of course has moments of being warm, patient and calm. The nature of behaviour is that it changes from moment to moment. We are never only one thing, though it can look like that when we hold things too close.

Further, the team’s assessment was not simply about the leader, it included in it a reflection of the person’s mood at the time, how happy they were working for the company in that moment, any preconceived notions of the leader they were holding onto, and a multitude of other inputs that go into an assessment at any given time.

It’s helpful to see how variable and fluid an assessment can be. It’s not that there’s no truth to them, it’s that holding them lightly and understanding the nature of assessments is helpful to how we handle them.

Now what does this mean for my client? Does he ignore the feedback? Does he simply keep doing what he’s been doing, convincing himself there’s nothing wrong?

He could, that’s always an option. But he decided to get curious instead.

We started exploring what was going on in the moments that he did feel he was being cold, short and irritable. What was he thinking in those moments that made his behaviour entirely justified?

He realized that he became irritable when he simply couldn’t understand how the team didn’t see what he saw. To him the path forward was clear as day, and so he assumed it must be clear as day for the others as well. To explain their resistance then, he believed they must either not be paying attention, being difficult to be difficult, or simply incompetent - hence he was irritated. Made sense!

Which brought us to reality; what is reality and how is it created?

What ensued was a beautiful exploration about how we create our own separate reality moment to moment.

This leader realized that he had assumed they were all watching the same movie with different perspectives on the plot. But what he started to get a real feel for was the fact that each of us is watching a completely different and separate movie that we project onto the screen of our consciousness.

He was acting within the context of there being one reality with possible different perspectives. But once he saw that there are as many realities as there are people in the world, something popped for him and his relationship with his team shifted overnight.

No effort required. He simply transformed. Transformed because his reality shifted in an instance.

It’s not that he never got frustrated with the fact that others weren’t “getting it”. He sometimes got caught up, but frustration became a cue that he was caught up, not a cue that everyone else was an idiot.

Once he really saw that everyone was living and experiencing their own reality, he naturally spent more time in curiosity and understanding, and a lot less time being short and irritable.

And it wasn’t fixing his illusory pathology that worked to shift his actions.

It was holding the list of grievances lightly because he understood the fluidity of it, and then to simply look in the direction of the universal truths of how we work and what it means to how we operate as leaders in the world.