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Category: Leadership

  • Why Inspiring Trust And Trusting Others Are Essential Leadership Capacities (Within Bounds)

    Why Inspiring Trust And Trusting Others Are Essential Leadership Capacities (Within Bounds)

    This is the first of two posts related to trust, one of the five essential capacities of cognition and character that a leader who shoulders great responsibility must have. These were originally published Forbes online.  This post explains why trust is a crucial capacity, how it has to be regulated and what happens when it is absent. The next post offers suggestions on the assessment of trust.

    The capacity for trust—both to trust others and to inspire trust—is a fundamental character trait every leader with great responsibility must have.  But it’s tricky.  A leader dependent on praise and affirmation or one who is overwhelmed by his duties can be too trusting.  Charismatic leaders excel at inspiring trust but can use it to manipulate their followers in ways that can turn malignant.  In fact, even the greatest leader—and each of us—sometimes trusts unwisely or lets down those who have trusted her.

    In this era of #metoo, “fake news,” “alternative facts,” integrity failures at businesses both old (Wells Fargo) and new (Uber) and Russian bots responding to our posts and tweets on Facebook and Twitter, few would dispute that we are embroiled in a crisis around trust in the workplace and the wider culture.

    A quick Google search of “leadership and trust” yields links to dozens of articles on how to build trust, quizzes for self-assessment of how trustworthy you seem to be (with tips on how to improve your score) and numerous consulting firms offering their services to help your company build a culture of trust.

    This article looks at trust from a different angle—as a fundamental personality trait that needs to be part of a comprehensive evaluation of a potential leader.

    Elsewhere I have written about a model of leadership assessment and development that proposes five essential cognitive capacities and personality traits that every leader must have.  Trust is one of the core five. (The others are self-awareness, empathy, critical thinking and discipline/self-control.) The model was derived from an unexpected but happy marriage of two bodies of thought—psychological studies of ego functions and executive functioning and the U.S. Army’s vision of leadership described in its remarkable Field Manual on Leader Development.

    In the case of self-awareness, critical thinking and discipline more is generally better. Trust and empathy are a little different, as an excess of either can lead to problems. A great leader needs to get it just right.

     The Capacity to Inspire Trust

    A leader’s capacity to inspire trust in others–that is, to be trustworthy–is essential in motivating and inspiring members of his team.  It’s also essential in helping everyone involved endure crises and manage difficult situations.

    The Capacity to Trust Others

    Trust in human relationships goes in two directions. The idea that a leader must be trustworthy is familiar.  That he also needs to have the capacity to trust others is less intuitively obvious, but the capacity to trust is essential. It’s a psychological predisposition learned in early childhood.

    The leader lacking in trust is unable to form effective relationships and functional teams.  Habitually feeling beleaguered and unfairly treated, he is drained of energy and focus and unfairly blames others, further creating a fragile, demoralized and suspicious environment.

    The capacity to trust others enables a leader to:

    • Create a shared understanding which is necessary for organized and strategic action.
    • Count on members of a team to fulfill expectations.
    • Delegate.
    • Maintain confidentiality throughout the organization.
    • Develop a cohesive team.
    • Build morale.
    • Absorb feedback, acknowledge errors and correct them.
    • Grow and develop leadership skills in followers.
    • Create a climate of respect and fairness.

    What Occurs When a Leader Trusts Others Too Much?

    Ideally, a leader possesses a general disposition to trust others but knows when and how to temper it with realism and diligence. When a leader is not discerning enough in his trust of others, blind spots flourish and, paradoxically, people in the organization feel unsafe.  Inappropriate trust may occur because a leader is too dependent on the approval of others or overwhelmed by his duties.  Here are some of the potential consequences:

    • Failure to attend to clues suggesting malfeasance or dishonesty.
    • Negligence and poor oversight.
    • Confirmation bias takes hold.
    • Vulnerability to being fooled by someone on whom the leader is dependent.

    When is a Good Thing too Much?

    Trusting Others

    Ken McCracken, head of Family Business Consulting at KPMG UK, writing about trusted advisors to family businesses, alerts us to the dangers of “affinity fraud,” a concept as applicable to corporate and organizational leadership as it is to family enterprise.

    Affinity fraud occurs when trust is automatically greater for those who are “like us” or part of an in-group.McCracken cites the case of infamous investor Bernie Madoff:

    Madoff “exploited his social connections to court investments from individuals and institutions among the Jewish community. Some of his clients seem to have relied on their shared background with Madoff to overcome any doubts they had about the barely believable financial returns that were promised. Investors it seems were persuaded that it was plausible that someone from the same community, or in-group, could be trusted to give them a great deal that would have sounded too good to be true had it been offered by an outsider without such ties.“

    However, having a tilt towards trust is not a bad thing. McCracken also identifies a group he calls “optimists”— those who have the disposition to trust people including those who are different and outsiders. Optimists count competence as more important than affinity.

    The intrinsic optimism in this attitude usually means that setbacks involving breach of trust … are absorbed without … sacrificing the view that people are generally trustworthy and that this attitude is the right way to live and conduct the affairs of the family business.

    Inspiring Trust

    Charismatic leaders inspire trust based on the force of their personality and the magnetism of their vision.  Their followers are prone to ignore information that would weaken the comforting idealization of their leader.  Charismatic leaders create a regressive psychological situation in the groups they lead where emotion holds sway over rational thought.  It’s best to think of the trust evoked by charismatic leaders as a very powerful tool that can be used for good or ill.  The wise charismatic leader will understand that the degree of trust his followers have in him is out of proportion to his merit and is careful not to exploit it.

    Conclusion

    Trust is a matter of finding the right balance.  It is essential that a leader has the capacity to trust others.  She must also be alert to reality, open to the limitations of trust and the possibility that trust will be betrayed.  She must be able to recover from disappointments in the realm of trust without a shift in basic attitude.  A leader must also be able to inspire trust, but he needs to temper his followers’ trust with a crisp understanding of his limitations and the possibility of inadvertently evoking blind and inappropriate trust.

    The single best measure of reliable and appropriately modulated trust for those assessing a potential leader is her capacity to admit errors, change course when new information comes in and welcome negative feedback and different opinions.

    Further Reading: How To Assess An Essential Leadership Capacity:  Trusting Others and Inspiring Trust

  • The Single Most Powerful Tool For Assessing Other People

    The Single Most Powerful Tool For Assessing Other People

    Originally appeared in Forbes.com 2/4/18.

    Assessing other people as you interact with them is one of the most important tools you can utilize in your professional life. It’s to your great advantage to learn how to interpret and then use your subjective reactions to people.

    Knowing how to read yourself and then what to do with you the information is a skill that takes some development and practice. But the investment is well worth the effort since your own responses to people will provide you with information about them that you can’t get anywhere else.

    Take empathy as a prime example. As I’ve explained elsewhere empathy is absolutely critical to leadership—it’s one of five essential character traits and cognitive capacities a leader responsible for the fate of people and enterprises must have.

     Let’s say you’re a member of a board search committee looking for a new CEO and you really want to know if your potential leader possesses the quality of empathy.

    One source of data is the way the candidate talks about the human side of her past business experiences. Does she show awareness of other people’s perspectives, needs and feelings? Does she demonstrate an understanding that these are important? Can she talk about instances where her empathy failed and what she thought and did about it? These are self-reports about the person’s experiences—how they have operated in the world. Useful, but basically hearsay.

    A different and deeper level of data can be gleaned during a get-acquainted conversation. When you’re in a meaningful conversation with another person, you are essentially creating a laboratory situation where the data is being created in real time, not just reported historically.

     What’s your personal experience as you’re sitting with someone, getting to know him? Does the candidate you’re interviewing show empathy for you? I don’t mean whether or not he is nice.  Rather, does he have the capacity and interest to investigate what you want from the interaction and respond appropriately? Is he smart and perceptive about your point of view and needs? Can he track your subtle signals of interest and shift gears when your attention moves on? Does he quickly figure out the direction your questions are going and then help by giving you the insight you’re reaching for?

    Here’s the secret sauce: If you’re trying to get to know a potential leader who lacks empathy, your own subjective experience is deeply telling.  You’ll find yourself feeling frustrated and bored.  Time will go slowly. You’ll search for questions. Because the answers you’re getting won’t satisfy you, you’ll keep looking for other ways to ask the same question. The conversation will feel like hard work. Why do you feel that way?  Because the person across the table doesn’t have the capacity to connect with you. A connection can only happen when both parties have some degree of empathy. And without that empathic connection, a conversation lacks vitality.

    In contrast, if you’re sitting with a person who does have the capacity for empathy, there will be more flow. You’ll feel invigorated; the conversation will have its own spark and creativity.

    A client asked me to interview a candidate for a potential leadership position. The potential hire had tremendous technical skills. Reviewing the materials I received before the assessment, I learned about a corporate blunder in which the candidate had been involved in his previous position. It wasn’t a deal breaker, but I wanted to know how he viewed his role in the poorly led episode. After an hour of conversation, which had gone reasonably well (though I did have a bit of that feeling that time was moving slowly), I brought up the blunder. I said I wondered what his thoughts were about it. He immediately got defensive and dismissive, which startled me. I persisted, saying I really wanted to understand what he thought about what had happened. He made another excuse, looked away, seemed bored and changed the subject. I tried one more time but was unable to get him to engage.

    I was annoyed and frustrated. I felt I wanted something from him and he wouldn’t give it to me! I didn’t care about the blunder itself. It was one of those unfortunate things that could have happened to anyone. But I wanted to talk about it. Beyond that, I realized, I was looking for him to show some regret or shame or ruefulness. I wanted him to say, “Yeah that was really awful, and I don’t ever want to be in that position again. “ He would have totally won me over with a sentence like that, showing some feeling about the matter and an interest in sharing the story — maybe because of, rather than in spite of, the fact it was painful.

    So in that two-person interaction, I had a specific need — to hear a feeling-full story about the blunder. He was unable to read me successfully and either satisfy that need or tell me why he couldn’t. “It’s confidential, I can’t talk about it” would have worked too.

    Contemplating a partnership? You definitely want to establish that your potential partner has the capacity for empathy. A professional colleague and I were considering a joint venture. We went to dinner with a contact of his who was key to our meeting the people we wanted to work with. My colleague spent much of the meeting describing my accomplishments and what I could do for clients. While on the surface it was complimentary and all about me, I felt uncomfortable and strangely invisible. Thinking about my internal reaction, I realized he made me feel like an object, not a person.  If he had been in my shoes, I imagine he might have enjoyed the attention. But empathy requires you to know how the other person feels in their shoes, not how you would feel in their situation. I don’t like that kind of attention, and that’s not how I like to present myself to or get to know new acquaintances.  Despite a superficially exciting and successful meeting, my subjective discomfort and feeling of invisibility made me realize that this was not a partnership to pursue.

    Even in a business situation, you have subtle, personal and specific emotional needs and preferences for how you like to interact. Think of it as a unique personality fingerprint. If the person you’re assessing has the capacity for empathy, they will automatically detect that fingerprint and do their best to respond to it in order to facilitate a human connection.

  • Due Diligence: Why You Should Assess A Leader’s Capacity For Critical Thinking And Judgment

    Due Diligence: Why You Should Assess A Leader’s Capacity For Critical Thinking And Judgment

    Originally appeared in Forbes.com 1/25/18

    You might assume that “capacity to think” is something you don’t have to worry about if you’re in the process of selecting a new leader, whether it’s a new CEO or the founder of a company you’re investing in.  You’d be wrong.  Surprisingly, great credentials, a record of success and an impressive education do not guarantee that someone has the ability to do the high-level thinking required of a leader whose decisions have fateful consequences.

    Every search committee looking for a new CEO or organizational president and every investor evaluating the strength and promise of a business’ founder should include evaluation of the capacity for judgment and critical thinking as part of the vetting process when deciding to put the fate of their company in the hands of a new leader.

    How can someone even get close to a position as CEO or leader of a great organization without these fundamental cognitive strengths?  It happens all the time. Charisma, connections, luck, canniness, creativity and vision can all propel someone into a position of power.  It doesn’t mean their judgment is up to snuff.

    Elsewhere I’ve written about five core character traits and cognitive abilities that every leader who is responsible for the fate of an enterprise and its people absolutely must have.  Perhaps the most vital of all is the capacity for critical thinking and judgment. Which is not to minimize the importance of the other four:  empathy, trust (both the ability to trust others and inspire their trust), self-control/discipline and self-awareness.

    This model of the fundamental requirements for a leader is distilled from two broad sources—my own 35 years’ experience as a practicing psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and organizational leader, using the long traditions of thought and research in psychology and psychoanalysis, and a remarkable document (itself based on the same theoretical and empirical foundation), the Army Field Manual on Leader Development.

     Good judgment depends on the ability to think critically and strategically.  This can be broken down into multiple essential functions, including the ability to plan ahead in a way that is thoughtful and organized, the ability to organize information into a coherent and logical narrative and the ability to understand cause and effect.

    To my mind, the most important aspect of critical thinking is the capacity to anticipate consequences.  At the basic level, this is linear–what are the immediate, mid-term and long-term consequences of a decision?  But the best leadership mind anticipates consequences more expansively, perceiving a multidimensional outcome and, immediately, the range of complex secondary and tertiary outcomes that will spin off in response to each level of change.

    A leader’s thought process needs to be dominated by reason and facts, not emotion.  But it’s equally important for a leader to know the effects stress and emotion have on his own thinking and be able to discern when irrational forces are overtaking dispassionate logic.  This is harder than it might seem since we are all subject to unconscious mental forces that can distort thinking without revealing they are at work.

    Critical thinking requires the ability to compare current situations to similar ones encountered in the past, using the richness of previous experience with problems to inform present assessment.  But this necessary use of past experience has to be tempered by alertness to unconscious biases and fears.  Doctors are taught to beware of the “last grave error syndrome”–the tendency to overcompensate because you screwed up last time.  Just because you missed a case of heart disease doesn’t mean every patient you see now needs excessive cardiac testing.  In investing, just because you left a short position too soon and lost a mint doesn’t mean you should stay in your current short positions.

    The leader who can think clearly is able to set aside his own ego and self-esteem as he evaluates a situation.

    Critical thinking requires the ability to approach a problem with an organized assessment process:  knowing what information to gather, considering alternative explanations and points of view, actively seeking contrarian opinions and perspectives, identifying gaps in information and knowledge and identifying a process to fill them.

    Since problem-solving is dependent on thinking and judgment,  these capacities can be assessed by observing how the leader organizes her response to a crisis, an unexpected situation or a stalemate.

    How can you identify inadequacies in a potential leader’s critical thinking and judgment? Look for these specific signs of deficiency. Many of these I’ve extracted from the Army Manual, which does an invaluable job of operationalizing what otherwise would be abstract and difficult to assess capacities:

    • Signs of disorganization in thinking or speech.
    • Over-focus on details; inability to see the big picture.
    • Lack of clarity about priorities.
    • Inability to anticipate consequences.
    • Failure to consider and articulate second and third-degree consequences of an action or decision.
    • Inability to offer alternative explanations or courses of action.
    • Oversimplification.
    • Inability to distinguish critical elements in a situation from less important ones.
    • Inability to articulate thought process including the evidence used to arrive at a decision,  other options that were considered and how a conclusion was reached.
    • Unable to tolerate ambiguity/over-certainty.
    • Difficulty outlining a step-wise process to solve a problem or implement a change.
    • Thinking that is driven by emotion or ego.

    Besides recruitment and promotion, this conceptual model provides a useful framework in other contexts.

    Leadership coaches can use it to identify areas a client needs to attend to and strengthen. Mentors and managers developing leadership potential in individuals they’re working with can pinpoint strengths and weaknesses.

    Anyone in a leadership position herself or who aspires to one can also use this model, with its breakdown of the components of critical thinking, as a self-assessment and capacity development tool to identify personal deficiencies and look for ways to improve in this essential area.  Each of us has a unique hard-wired and learned set of cognitive tools and none of us has a toolkit that isn’t missing a few pieces.

    Critical thinking and judgment are among the most advanced and sophisticated cognitive skills, demanding difficult and fluid mental processes of synthesis, discrimination and complex analysis. Even the best thinker will lapse to a lower level of cognitive functioning at times of enormous stress, emotional overload, illness, sleep deprivation or fatigue.  Knowing when one’s capacity for critical thinking is sub-par is just as vital as being able to do it well.

    Additional reading:  The Unexamined Mind Doesn’t Think Well: Why Self Awareness Is A Fundamental Leadership Capacity and Empathy Is An Essential Leadership Skill–And There’s Nothing Soft About It

  • Empathy Is An Essential Leadership Skill–And There’s Nothing Soft About It

    Empathy Is An Essential Leadership Skill–And There’s Nothing Soft About It

    Originally appeared on Forbes.com 12/26/17.

    I get tired of hearing about “soft skills,” even when it’s acknowledged they are important. No less a hard-muscled body than the U.S. Army, in its Army Field Manual on Leader Development (one of the best resource on leadership I’ve ever seen) insists repeatedly that empathy is essential for competent leadership.

    Why?  Empathy enables you to know if the people you’re trying to reach are actually reached.  It allows you to predict the effect your decisions and actions will have on core audiences and strategize accordingly.  Without empathy, you can’t build a team or nurture a new generation of leaders.  You will not inspire followers or elicit loyalty. Empathy is essential in negotiations and sales:  it allows you to know your target’s desires and what risks they are or aren’t willing to take.

    Elsewhere I’ve proposed a short list of 5 essential cognitive capacities and personality traits that every leader who assumes great responsibility must have.  Empathy is one of the core five.  (The others are self-awareness, trust, critical thinking and discipline/self-control.)

     Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s experience, perspective and feelings. Also called “vicarious introspection,” it’s commonly described as the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes.  But make sure you are assessing how they would feel in their shoes, not how you would feel in their shoes.  This is the tricky part.

    I remember my husband taking me cross-country skiing for the first time early in our marriage. He was sure (putting himself in my shoes) that I would love the sport as much as he did.   From the minute the skis were strapped on me,  I absolutely hated it.  Being generally clumsy and lacking good balance, the sensation of non-stop instability was anything but fun for me—in fact, it made me miserable.   My husband kept insisting I would love it if I just gave it a chance.  Naturally athletic and graceful, he couldn’t imagine the experience I was having in my shoes—now strapped tightly to long slippery sticks!   It took years for me to convince him that my experience on cross country skis was utterly different from his.  Fortunately, I discovered the pleasure of tramping around on snowshoes. The solidity and certainty gave me a chance to enjoy winter woods while he continued to enjoy sliding around on icy snow.

     Like the practice of self-awareness, empathy involves scanning large sets of data, sorting out what’s noise and what’s essential information.  The process is not so different from what a stock analyst does when scanning the market and looking for signals, anomalies and novel patterns that jump out and make him take notice, realizing something important is going on.

    There is a significant business cost when leaders lack empathy.  Just ask United Airlines which earned the dishonor of having committed “one of the worst corporate gaffes” ever, according to Bloomberg’s Christopher Palmeri and Jeff Green, when a physician was dragged off a plane to empty his paid seat for an employee.  It took United’s CEO, Oscar Munoz, three tries before his public response showed any empathy. Munoz’s first and woefully inadequate statement, “I apologized for having to re-accommodate these customers,” seriously missed the mark in attempting to relate to his customer’s experience.  In his second statement, Munoz compounded the error by blaming the victim—describing the passenger as defiant, belligerent and disruptive.  Only with his third try, when Munoz said, “I promise you we will do better,” did he demonstrate an empathic understanding of his current and future customers.

    Lack of empathy is a major contributor to the tsunami of sexual harassment incidents that have dominated recent news and led to the departures of accomplished leaders.  Commenting on an employee’s body or, worse, grabbing her, requires a failure of empathy.  If a boss were able and willing to put himself in the employee’s shoes and understand how she would feel when subjected to his actions, he would be far less likely to do what he’s doing.

    Can empathy be learned?  To some degree. The capacity for empathy is an innate human trait, and like all of these, there is a spectrum of strength and weakness. Some people are more naturally gifted at quickly sensing other peoples’ experience.  In fact, some of my clients have to be taught to put up an “empathic wall”—too much awareness of other peoples’ feelings cripples their ability to make decisions that lead to disappointment or bad feelings.

    Very successful business leaders are often extremely fast information processors.  With my clients who do not “suffer fools gladly,” I recommend taking a moment to deploy a bit of empathy—what’s behind a colleague’s wish to propose what immediately looks like a dumb idea? Follow with an empathic comment along the lines of “I can see why you got excited about that because it’s an important issue, but unfortunately it would raise compliance problems so we can’t pursue that route.” A 90-second investment of time can prevent the employee’s feeling humiliated and disaffected in the long-term.

    If you’re naturally low on the empathy scale, at least know you have this deficiency and that there is a cost to it. You can learn to check yourself and do what does not come naturally: before you act, school yourself to think of the people who will be affected and what your action will mean to them.  And try to remember to not just recognize but care about that impact on others. You can also make sure you have a trusted advisor who fills in the gap in your skillset.  That advisor must be empowered to stop you if you’re forgetting that there are other people in the world and that their feelings and agendas are not the same as yours—and that these matter.

    Whatever your natural endowment for empathy, your capacity for empathy and skill at deploying it waxes and wanes with your own physical and mental state.  If you’re ill or tired, it’s hard to have empathy for anyone but yourself. If you’re in the throes of creative excitement, it’s disruptive to consider the perspective of others.  And that’s fine, as long as it doesn’t last too long and you know to check back in with the human beings around you.

    Don’t confuse empathy with making people happy or being nice.  Sometimes you’ll suss out another’s perspective and feelings and purposefully ignore them.  Or even use it to gain an advantage.  Essentially empathy is a neutral data gathering tool that enables you to understand the human environment within which you are operating in business and therefore make better predictions, craft better tactics, inspire loyalty and communicate clearly.

  • Is There Such A Thing As A Rational Person?

    Is There Such A Thing As A Rational Person?

    Originally published on Forbes.com 12/18/17.

    The short answer is no.  The harder you try to be purely rational the less likely it is you’ll get there.  What people have is the capacity for rational thought.  This capacity exists on top (literally) of a large neurobiological apparatus that is driven by emotion.  And to complicate matters further, we all have the capacity for thought that doesn’t appear to be emotional but is far from rational— “fantastic thought” let’s call it. Finally, there’s a fourth factor that comes in to play which is neither thought nor emotion—I’ll borrow the term “self-state” from psychology.  This refers to underlying individual mental patterns of inherent personal reactivity to the environment. How much stimulation do you need?  What happens when you are tired?  When and how do you get over-loaded?  What leads to under-stimulation or boredom, and what effect does that have on your capacity to think?

    As a leader, you are constantly making enormously consequential decisions.  If you can’t count on yourself to be rational (and you can’t) what can you do?  In each of us, there is an ongoing mental minuet where rational thinking, fantastic thinking, self-states and emotion dance with one another and exert mutual influence in ever increasing complexity. At any given moment, some of the thought and emotion is unconscious as well.

    There is nothing to be gained by trying to eliminate emotion and fantastic thinking.  Even if it were possible, you wouldn’t want to.  They are the source of vision, motivation, energy and creativity.  When operating outside of our awareness, they are also the source of big errors in judgment.

     The cure is to practice, develop and keep developing self-knowledge.  When is my capacity for rational thought most likely to be overwhelmed by emotion?  What direction do I typically go when it is?  What fantastic thoughts do I hang on to?  How do these lead to specific emotions and/or interfere with rational decisions?  What are the various self-states I experience, what triggers them, and what happens to my thinking? In an earlier Forbes post, I wrote about practicing the capacity for self-awareness, the analytic process that leads to self-knowledge.

    The idea of the rational human started to take hold in the 1600’s, thanks to the Scientific Revolution when, among other events, Newton defined the laws of gravity and Galileo promulgated Copernicus’ sun-centric vision of the heavens.

     In 1632, Rene Descartes gave birth to modern Western philosophy with his famous statement “I think therefore I am”, establishing that the capacity to doubt proves that there is a thinking entity—and this defined what it meant to be a person.  The scientific revolution gave birth to the 18th century Enlightenment also known as the Age of Reason.

    Time went on and we all came to count on the idea that we humans had a refined capacity for rational thought. This despite the contribution from Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century, unearthing the very irrational and emotional unconscious mind as a prime motivator of human action.  Nevertheless, the preference for a rationalist theory of who we are persisted.

    Famously, it led economists to develop the theory of “the rational market” where a rational consumer makes informed calculations about cost and benefit and arrives at a rational conclusion.  The idea of a rational market was exploded by the wave of observations generated by behavioral economists, who demonstrated that unconscious, non-rational cognitive biases played an enormous role in decision making.

    The now well-known cognitive biases illuminated by behavioral economists are one type of fantastic thinking.  Let’s take the “gambler’s fallacy” as one example.  If I’ve flipped a coin five times and gotten heads each time, I’m sure I’m finally going to get tails on the sixth try, even though the probability remains 50/50.  These are automatic, more or less universal cognitive sets (fantastic thoughts), having nothing to do with emotion.  Another set of fantastic thoughts are highly personal.  They too seem devoid of emotion:  they are thoughts, not feelings.  But they are distorted thoughts, part of one’s personal narrative, forged in childhood and reinforced by later experiences.  “Everything I do has to be perfect. “I’m responsible for everything going right.” “Nobody gets it but me.” These non-rational thoughts are usually semi-conscious—lurking just below the surface of our thinking—and very powerful influencers on our overall thinking process.

    A final word about self-states—those phenomena that are neither thought nor emotion but nevertheless strong determinants of our actions.  I pay a lot of attention to these when working with clients.  Restlessness, uncertainty, boredom, over-stimulation, under-stimulation, excitement, flatness—we each have different tolerances for these states and different needs to achieve internal equilibrium and optimal functioning. For example, I tend to get anxious when faced with uncertainty, but paradoxically always seek and need the excitement and stimulation of new ideas and projects.  One of my investor clients found it hard to hold a position because of innate restlessness.  An organizational leader wanted a new position but needed a familiar social group to feel confident.  A business owner selling the company he built from nothing thrives on the adrenaline rush of making critical decisions.  How could he take on a role that was less intensely stimulating and still feel vital and engaged?

    Knowing how you personally integrate emotion, self-states, fantasies and rational thought on an ongoing basis leads to the best possible decision-making process.