- Do you ever get the sensation you want
to eat a whole pizza yourself?
While, another totally different part of yourself says,
"You should probably get a salad, fat ass."
It makes me wonder, am I truly one singular person
or are we many people in one body?
Neurologists are actually finding
we have many different agents inside of us,
not just one,
each with a totally different set of ideas and feelings,
and frankly, a history.
If you want to create anything,
including a billion dollar company,
you've got to handle this kind of thing.
First, at your individual conscious level,
and then after that, you can do it for your team.
And that's what it takes to make a team
that changes the world.
Watch this video and we're going to talk about how
to do that right now.
Let's get into it.
In April of last year,
I did a 360 Degree Review with my team.
What that means is my exec coach sat down
with the people I work most closely with over the year
and got feedback about me from them one-on-one.
Then she anonymized it and pulled out what I needed
to do to get better.
A 360 Review is an absolutely powerful tool
for you to know how you're doing
and what you could be doing better.
But this time, I got a big awakening
to something I wasn't totally aware of.
One of my team members said,
"Gary relies on other people to say no for him.
He feels things, but does not articulate them until later.
People can't immediately understand what he thinks
or feels about a situation."
Eh.
If you're a manager, you know this is a red flag.
I wasn't doing my job.
I wasn't being clear when I needed to be.
You need to know this is merely scratching the surface
of what's actually going on here.
To understand organizations and our job as leaders,
we need to understand our brains, our teams,
and how our social consciousness is woven together.
And only then can we change the world
through our work and our teams.
How did I get to this point?
I find that I'm actually often debating both sides
of a thing.
On the one hand, I do have my own viewpoint,
informed by my experience,
whether it's a go no go decision
about a product or how much to pay for something.
I'm always going to have my own opinion.
But on the other hand,
I end up having very detailed mental models
of what other people want, whether it's my customer,
my user, or my investor, or even my coworkers.
They have totally different motivations, wants, and needs.
And that's a good thing, actually.
One of the things that allows me
to do a good job as a designer, V.C., or manager,
is to be able to construct models of behavior
of other people based on their experience, not just mine.
These two sides play out within me,
kind of like an argument.
Sometimes it is many selves.
It might be me and several different perspectives
from different co-workers at play,
all arguing it out in front of me, within my brain,
at the same time.
Inside of me, I'm debating
with the constructed models of what other people want.
And when I don't properly resolve that back and forth,
I don't actually, as a leader,
make a good decision and I might end up relying
on others to interpret the tea leaves
and say yes or no for me.
Fundamentally, that means I am not integrated enough.
Here's what I realized.
There are many minds within me.
Through therapy and exec coaching,
I now know this about myself.
It's easy to lose myself in other people's perspective.
Their wants and needs are so vivid to me,
I've sometimes lost my own perspective.
Neuroscientists have been talking about exactly that.
What you and I experience as a unitary experience
of consciousness might not actually be.
Here's one of my favorite clips
from Adam Curtis's new documentary,
"Can't Get you Out of My Head."
- In the 1980s, the new group
of behavioral psychologists had argued
that what human beings think of, as their self,
is not fully in control of their actions.
Now, they had been joined by neuroscientists
who said they have discovered something even stranger.
That inside their brains,
human beings have all kinds of different selves,
which the conscious mind had no awareness of at all.
They were led by Michael Gazzaniga,
who would win a Nobel Prize for his work.
- With your right hand,
you point to this row.
And with your left hand, your point to this row.
- Okay.
- Okay?
- Gazzaniga studied the brains
of people like Vicky.
She suffered from extreme epilepsy.
To try and stop her attacks,
surgeons had cut the nerve fibers that link the two sides
of her brain,
which worked,
but it also revealed something very strange.
There was another force inside Vicky that emerged,
that kept trying to take control.
- I knew what I wanted to wear and I would open up my closet
and get ready to take it out.
My other hand would like, just take control.
It would just reach in and get something
that I wouldn't want at all.
And a couple of times, I had a pair of shorts on,
and then I find myself putting another pair of shorts on top
of a pair I had already had on.
And which I knew was, I knew was wrong.
- [Male Narrator] Gazzaniga argued
that really, there were multiple selves
inside the human brain,
each one taking control at different moments.
Normally that is hidden because the one self
that is conscious constantly makes up stories
to explain what all the other selves are doing.
But when the connection between the two parts
of the brain is cut, it can't do that.
And the other parts emerge.
"Vicky wasn't strange," Gazzaniga said.
"She just showed the truth."
Gazzaniga argued, that really, all human beings
live in a made up dream world of stories,
which give them the illusion that they're in control.
When really, there is something else inside them
that they will never contact.
- What this professor proposes is that many minds decide
and then our verbal centers rationalize.
There is no united self, but many of them
and all of us human beings live in a made up dream
of stories that give the illusion
that we have control
when really there's something else inside
of us that we might never ever be in contact with.
The psychological self might actually be multiple selves.
They have emotions, incentives, destinies,
and they can control the motor apparatus, you know,
our bodies and what we say and what we do.
And then there's a verbal part trying to rationalize this
after the fact.
Let's think about this for just a moment.
Whoa.
There are many minds outside of us, too.
Here's where the organization matters.
Robert Kegan, Harvard researcher,
says there are five stages of development,
of which the latter four are progressively attained
in adulthood.
Only a small number of adults actually reach
the fourth stage and beyond.
Stage one is purely impulse or reflex driven.
It's infancy and early childhood.
Stage two, the person's sense of self is actually ruled
by their needs and their wishes.
The needs and wishes of others in that stage
are only relevant to the extent that they support those
of the person.
Effectively, that person lives in two separate worlds
in that way.
And this is how most children and adolescents live.
Stage three is where the person's sense of self
is socially determined based on the real
or imagined expectations of others.
And this is really our twenties.
Stage four is pretty awesome.
That's the stage where the person's sense
of self is determined by a set
of values that they have authored for themselves.
And it's rarely achieved and only in adulthood.
Stage five, sort of sounds like nirvana to me.
The person's sense of self is no longer bound
to any particular aspect of themselves or their history.
They're free to allow themselves to focus
on the flow of their lives.
Those stages are so powerful and so important to know
because they give us a very specific cosmology
for how we should strive to live our lives.
Now that we know Kegan's ladder,
I realized that I've been climbing this ladder all along.
As a child, we are impulse driven.
As an adolescent, we're ruled by our own needs and wishes.
As a young adult,
our sense of self is defined by our social standing.
Who am I in relationship to my group, my tribe,
my school, my friends, my family,
and my workplace.
To progress beyond stage three,
we must ask, "Can I transcend my own bodily needs?"
Like right now, I'm crazy cold,
so give me a second, I need to get a jacket.
Oh, okay, much better.
Where were we?
Oh, right.
Transcending my own bodily needs.
Well, not only that, can I transcend my desire
for money, for sex, for fame, or for material goods?
Let's get back to the feedback I got from my team.
Gary relies on other people to say no for him.
He feels things, but does not articulate them until later.
People can't immediately understand what he thinks
or feels about a situation.
When in this state, I'm of many minds,
some my own and some made of constructed models
of the people around me.
I was stuck in stage three, a socially constructed self.
So I was super conflict avoidance.
And I could not say no, or even express a preference.
I was pretty lucky though, because deep down,
I knew that I was going to have problems with this.
I always have.
And here's where hiring well helped.
I'd built a team and set up values
that they could work towards,
even if in the moment I couldn't express
that preference myself.
I'm super thankful and I'm super glad for this team
because it was the strength of that team
that got me through a very hard time.
But relying on the team to say things
that I needed to say myself,
that's always going to be worse than doing it yourself.
These days, through coaching and therapy,
I'm now aware of when these conflicts
are actually occurring inside of me.
And I think that that's a really big win
and I hope you can get that, too.
How did I do this?
I discovered that I can actually notice
when these conflicts are happening,
and if I can notice, then I can inflect into the conflict.
How do I notice this?
Well, for me, it's actually physiological.
I can feel my breath and my heart rate go faster.
I can feel my face get hot.
Those are the moments where I need to pause
and take stock of the many minds.
If I can give a voice to the different parts of me,
then I can also notice what I truly want,
and then I can express a preference,
when before, I would have been unable to.
Ray Dalio talks a lot about meditation
as a key force for why he was successful.
He says, "It helps to slow things down
so I can act calmly, even in the face of chaos,
just like a ninja in a street fight."
I really like that quote a lot.
Chaos is going to be a given,
conflict is a part of life,
but if you can notice your many selves
and break apart what you truly want
versus your modeling of others,
then you can reach Kegan's stage four,
a life that is truly authored by you.
If you are wondering what happened,
I did just do a 360 Degree Review
with my team this year
and I'm happy to report I've been able to solve my problem
of asking others to fight my battles for me.
They're happy and so am I.
As they say, knowing is half the battle.
If you can be integrated
and aware at your individual conscious level,
then you can integrate your team
into a powerful resolute, super organism
that can build incredible products and services.
That's what it takes to make something bigger
than any of ourselves.
When leaders do this,
we are greater than the sum of our parts.
Thanks for watching all the way to the end.
Every week, I put these videos together to try to help you
on your journey to founderhood.
These are the things that I wish I knew
when I was starting out.
I can't live my life over again,
but I can give you these lessons
so you don't have to learn them the hard way.
If you like this video,
please click Subscribe (soft clicking)
and the bell icon to get notifications for my posts
every single week. (bell ringing)
I really appreciate you watching and I'll see you next week.