After Gil’s passing, I began to think more and more about empathy and what it really meant. I thought about how most of us spend so much time trying to get a grasp on one another, but rarely do we take the time to delve deep and try to understand our own selves.
THE WHOLE SELF
Philosophers and psychologists have suggested for years that each of us is made up of many “selves.” Carl Jung referred to them as opposing attitudes of the ego and the unconscious. William James is quoted as saying, “Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.” Emmanuel Kant wrote extensively about the “I of reflection” that we encounter through apperception. This stuff can get really heady, really fast.
I’ve taken bits of philosophy that have resonated with me and tried them on for size. Some fit nicely, others were cumbersome and clunky. Over time, I’ve come to believe that we have within us seven distinct facets of self. When they are working together, aligned and empowered, we understand ourselves fully. When they are in discord, imbalanced and confused, we cannot become the leaders, creators, or partners we want to be.
These seven selves begin at our roots. The first to consider is the Physical Self, which helps us explore the power of our presence and experience the environment around us. Gil’s early lesson with the doorknobs was engaging me in a kind of kinesthetic learning in which I was becoming more aware of myself through action and movement. He was pushing me to get into touch with my physical presence, to inhabit the here and now, and to be in command of my own body. Without this sort of presence, any other more cerebral pursuits are futile.
Next is our Emotional Self, which connects us to our personal needs and our inner voice, giving us a means to achieve greater understanding and self-knowledge. This self helps us understand our biases, our fears, and our self-imposed limitations and constrictions. Talk therapy is a great way to explore this realm of the self. This therapy is often diagnostic, and ideally, when effective, it can lead to actionable behavioral changes that help us come into our true “self.”
The Inspired Self is the spark that ignites the inherent desire to make, to do, and to solve. We engage with this self when we establish goals or intentions we want to pursue and then take the steps to act upon them. Think about the times you’ve set a goal for yourself, then acted upon it and accomplished it. The deep sense of accomplishment you get fuels the Inspired Self and encourages us to set new goals.
Unfortunately, many of us get stuck in this self, especially those of us in the business world who thrive on the achievement of measured goals, to the exclusion of the other aspects of the self, causing us to hold ourselves back from a deeper, more whole sense of understanding and personal growth.
Having grasped our physical, emotional, and inspired states of being, we can begin to look at how we fit within the context of the world around us. What role do we play among our family, friends, and colleagues? This is the Community Self, and it helps us understand how our individual self interacts with the world around us. What type of person are we at work? At home? Do people rely on us the same way? Do we provide different things to different people, or are our core aspects of ourselves relied upon in a similar way irrespective of the people around us? The Community Self helps us know what others most often rely upon us to do and helps us contextualize the “fit” of our relationships.
If people ask us to behave in a manner consistent with our own views and the intent of our Whole Self, we can work with others effectively. But when we are urged to deviate from our authentic self, to act in ways that pull us from our core beliefs, it is often an indicator that we need to do some personal work to improve our sense of agency or the dynamics of our relationships.
One way we can make such changes is to begin to engage with the Intellectual Self. This is the self that asks questions both old and new, micro and macro, universal and specific, to help us get a grasp on our perspective and communicate it effectively. At times our emotions are complex and hard to manage. How many times have you acted out of anger and said something you shouldn’t have? Or been so overjoyed that you saw a situation through rose-colored glasses, obscuring the reality? The Intellectual Self helps put our emotions and senses into concepts and words that help us understand what’s going on inside us and relate more effectively to those around us.
Mindfulness is an ancient topic that has become increasingly popular again. The growing interest in meditation, from tried-and-true forms such as Vedic and Zen meditation to more contemporary modalities such as Transcendental Meditation (TM) and facilitation tools such as the popular app Headspace, have helped people the world over to become more conscious and aware. It’s no coincidence that in these trying times, we are seeing more people, of all demographics and psychographics, begin to explore a more mindful state of being. This is the nature of the Mindful Self. This self’s primary function is to raise our consciousness for the present moment, our relationship with the world around us in this moment, and our place in it.
Once we had outlined these six selves—the Physical, Emotional, Inspired, Community, Intellectual, and Mindful—I thought about what these different facets of our inner workings add up to. What kind of clarity do they create?
For me, they come together in an awareness of our Aspirational Self. Some might call this our purpose. This is what we strive for and constantly pursue. It clarifies the vision we have of our growth and what we see as the necessary steps to getting us there.
It is in our nature to grow, to learn lessons, and to evolve. Many great spiritual teachers, spanning all religions and sects, have shared this lesson with us for millennia. The pursuit and acceptance of the Aspirational Self allows our lives to gain meaning. Having a sense of our greater purpose is like the magnetism that keeps a compass needle pointing toward the north. With clarity of purpose, we can make choices and take actions clear-mindedly.
These are the aspects of the Whole Self.
It is no coincidence that they correspond with many ancient teachings. Those who are familiar with the Eastern concept of the chakras can see how these seven facets of the Whole Self correspond with the seven primary chakras. They, like other mind/body mapping frameworks such as the Chinese dantians, are used to help translate ancient wisdom into understandable states of knowledge.
Though I have invested countless hours into thinking deeply about these matters, exploring my own personal development, and relaying my thoughts to others who are walking along a similar path, I do not believe there is a finish line because these pursuits are never fully finished. Instead, maintaining an awareness of the Whole Self is a constant practice of self-attention and awareness, affording us the opportunity to notice when we are losing track of a part of our self and enabling us to make small course corrections or adjustments to regain alignment.
Do I still open doors unconsciously from time to time? Absolutely. But I also know that through the daily, hourly, and moment-to-moment act of self-observation, we can understand and attain a better and more whole self.
Even if just for a moment.
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF FEELING
At Nike, a pair of size 13s was waiting for me. Wearing a pair of Nike Hyperfeels felt like wearing a padded sock. That was the first thought I had when I slipped my feet into the stretchy material. When I walked, I could feel the texture of the concrete below my feet. It was weird. I wasn’t barefoot, but the shoes made me feel something close to barefoot.
Others from our team had a similar experience. We began to talk more about going barefoot and how rarely any of us was outside our apartments without shoes on. (I mean, after all, we do live in New York, and who knows what might be lurking on the sidewalks waiting to jab, cut, or poke our feet.) The Nike Hyperfeel was built on more than ten years of learning from the company’s Nike Free franchise, which they had launched in 2005. Nike Free was grounded on the notion that barefoot running strengthens your feet. As our Sub Rosa team did its research for Hyperfeel, we talked to r
unners who said they knew about the growing “barefoot running” trend and the fact that many athletes had started running without shoes as part of their training.
A number of them told us that the most notable moment for barefoot running happened at the starting line of the Summer Olympics marathon in Rome more than fifty years earlier. Abebe Bikila, an unknown Ethiopian marathoner, lined up barefoot next to some of the world’s top runners. A little more than two hours later, he was the first to cross the finish line, his bare feet leaving a trail of runners behind him.
Since then, the trend has continued to ebb and flow in popular culture. In 2009, the book Born to Run, which was in part about barefoot running, was released and sold millions of copies. This added to the frenzy already started by the Nike Free shoes, and led to an emergence in barefoot running. The more we researched the subject, the more information we discovered. Barefoot running helps change the way your foot strikes the ground. You become more aware of your gait, and some runners even say you can reach a more meditative state while running barefoot. We knew that if we could elucidate the power of this mind-body connection, we could show how Nike’s new product would help people fully connect with their feet, themselves, and the world around them.
We looked at the seven aspects of the Whole Self and applied each one to the feet and the experience of running; and then we considered how we could integrate those insights with the whole body and mind. Soon an outline for our strategy began to form.
• The Physical Self: We would use the feet as part of the overall product launch.
• The Emotional Self: We would find a way to heighten the emotional response to the activity of placing the feet on the ground (or floor).
• The Inspired Self: We would create an experience that would prompt participants to want to learn more about the barefoot running trend.
• The Community Self: We would design the experience in a way that would compel the participants to connect with one another about what had happened to them.
• The Intellectual Self: We would provoke a sense of curiosity in the participants by communicating information to them in a nontraditional and sensorial way.
• The Mindful Self: We would encourage the participants to reach a state of connection to the present moment and the world around them through an immersive experience.
• The Aspirational Self: We would give the participants a takeaway that would reveal something about themselves they didn’t already know, which they could use in the pursuit of their higher goals.
At least, that was the plan. We still needed to come up with the big idea, but those were definitely our building blocks. We knew that connecting with some of these selves would be more difficult than others, but considering the effect the shoes had had on us, it made sense to incorporate the concept of the Whole Self.
We started to think about how we could use Hyperfeel to get people more engaged in the act of running. We talked about having a group run in the shoes, followed by a workshop in which the participants would give us feedback. Those ideas were okay but didn’t really tick all the boxes.
Then it hit us. We wanted to have people really connect with the value of the Nike Free Hyperfeel, and to do that, we needed to have them appreciate the experience of being barefoot. Most people haven’t run barefoot, and many just slip on a pair of socks, regular running shoes, and go. They don’t feel the ground, and they don’t have the sensorial connection to what’s below them. We needed to change that if we were to contribute to the successful launch of the Hyperfeel. We had to lead people to empathy for the experience of being barefoot.
PLEASE TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES AND SOCKS
We wanted to create a sensorial experience that would allow people to engage with the soles of their feet, recognizing the role they play as sense receptors. From there, they would discover for themselves how using their feet in this way can positively influence their own meditative state.
Over the years, we’ve worked with many different clients. The ones who are the most fun are those who are as thoughtful as they are brave, who are willing to take calculated risks when they believe those risks are in the best interest of the brand and the business. Nike is one of those clients. Our clients quickly green-lit our concept, and before we knew it, we were in preproduction to design and build an immersive 4,000-square-foot labyrinth in the middle of downtown Manhattan.
We designed the Hyperfeel experience to be explored in the dark. From the outside, it was a black-on-black, monolithic-looking structure with a subtle, illuminated Nike swoosh on the side. We provided no explanation about what was happening on the inside. For us, that was part of the intrigue of the experience. The exterior wasn’t where the story was being told. What mattered was what people found inside—and ultimately inside themselves.
The guest list was full of important members of the media as well as influencers from the sports community. Olympic runners, professional athletes, and members of local running clubs were all queuing up to experience what was going on inside the mystery box. Such campaigns, ones geared toward influencers, are designed to drive buzz and awareness. By reaching a few thousand influential people and giving them a powerful experience, we were counting on them to spread the story of Hyperfeel and create a word-of-mouth campaign. I always trust news I hear from my friends more than what I hear from advertisements. Our goal was to create believers in the product by doing what we do best: letting them connect empathically with the product and its story. If we got that right, everything else would take care of itself.
Once inside, guests were greeted and asked to take a seat. Next we asked them to take off their shoes and socks. We then attached a smartphone to each person’s arm and rigged them with a sensor that would track their brain waves. We let them know we were doing it as a way of capturing data for “something that will be revealed at the end of the experience.”
It’s difficult enough to get consumers to do experimental stuff, but athletes and members of the media are even more dubious about this sort of marketing. We weren’t telling them what was going to happen inside, which made it even more challenging. But we applied empathy in anticipating how they would react to what we were asking them to do, and we let them know that we actually wanted them to be skeptical. We didn’t want them to be easily convinced. We just hoped they would go into the experience with an open mind and see what happened.
That simple conversation—a subtle but direct addressing of what we empathically knew was a point of resistance—helped us reach a place of trust and collaboration with the participants.
Everyone was up for it.
One by one, we led them through a dark curtain and into the pitch-black labyrinth. They were told that the only way to get to the other side was to trust their feet and feel the textures below them. As the texture of the floor changed, they were encouraged to pause for a moment and stand on the particular material to see how it made them feel. We asked them to use their feet as a guide and keep walking until they found the next texture. They moved from rubber to asphalt, from wet rocks to grass, and on over a variety of other surfaces along the journey.
Our sensors let us know where people were in the maze, and we could trigger audio or lighting effects to guide them if they got lost.
Some people flew through the space and were on the other side in five minutes, but others took their time, enjoying hanging out in the darkness and sensing the space around them. One person spent a little more than thirty minutes inside. A few people on our team debated going in after him, but while they were deciding, he emerged at the exit with a wide smile on his face.
Once the participants reached the end, we removed the sensors and downloaded the brain-wave data we’d collected. We projected the results onto a six-foot circular surface in a sort of abstract digital mandala where they could see their brain-wave activity as they had moved from surface to surface. That gave each participant a unique insight into his or her own neurological experience, and the participants b
egan to realize what powerful sense receptors their feet were.
Some of them learned that their brain was at its most meditative state when they were standing on grass, yet every day they ran on a city street. As more data was revealed, people began having interesting conversations about how they might change their running routes to help put them into a better position to be in a more relaxed, calmer mental state.
That was the point.
Our part in Nike’s overall launch of the Hyperfeel was not just to sell a shoe; we wanted to show how this particular product, and the new technology that had gone into it, could lead people to become more fully engaged with the world around them—all through the soles of their feet.
We gave each participant a custom print of his or her mandala, and sent all of them a digital version they could share in social media. Over a three-day period, we hosted more than a thousand people in the space. As they left and shared their experiences online, we were able to launch the shoe to millions of people with real firsthand accounts of what it felt like to wear the new product. The press started to pick up the story, and that played into Nike’s overall marketing launch of Hyperfeel, and soon the shoe was part of the national conversation.
The shoes flew off the shelves, and Nike sold out of the first run within days of the launch. It was a huge success.
But for us it was more than a success with a client; it showed that applying empathy, with an emphasis on the Whole Self, was an effective means of solving a problem. We weren’t just trying to sell a product; we looked at all facets of the experience and delivered something that truly addressed each component of the whole self—giving people an experience that engaged every part of their being.
Applied Empathy Page 6
