• Do you feel you are where you wanted to be five years ago?
• Are you satisfied with your personal growth? With your life’s trajectory?
• What traits emerge when you sense your ego or personality begin to enlarge itself?
• Why does that happen?
Give your Intellectual Self permission to ask objective questions that challenge your worldview, and in equal measure do the same with your personal state. Contemplate tough questions, not just easy ones. Challenge yourself to consider things you don’t want to confront. Doing so will lead you to the most honest and literal appraisal of where you stand and what path you’ve taken in your life.
Allow this exercise to reset your expectations or ambitions. The Intellectual Self can reorient you when it’s necessary, and you will continue to adjust your heading as you walk along life’s path. Don’t feel obliged to hold on to things that no longer serve you. Instead, embrace this exercise as a permission-granting moment to take a fresh look at yourself and chart a course for your future.
Mindful Self
The Mindful Self is attuned to presence. The previous exercises have focused on individually sensing your physical body, emotions, feelings, and thoughts. Now you will let go of this compartmentalizing and acknowledge all of those states at the same time.
Those of you who are already meditators may find this exercise similar to your existing practice.
Get yourself into a comfortable seated position and begin with three slow, deep breaths.
Gently close your eyes and allow your thoughts to drop away. Sense the present moment without internal dialogue or thought. When thoughts arise, and they will, acknowledge them. You see, the mind is built to think. That’s what it does most often, so thoughts are inevitable.
In this meditation, we are developing a different relationship to our thoughts. We aren’t dwelling on them or allowing them to go on forever. Instead, we use this time to notice when a thought occurs, and we take a moment to acknowledge it.
You might even find it helpful to label your thoughts. You might label some as “thinking” or “inner dialogue.” The point is to notice them, feeling any emotions or sensations associated with them, and then return to the present.
This acknowledgment and return to the present are work you do with your Mindful Self as you continue strengthening your comfort with self-observation and presence.
Once you’ve completed this meditation, take a moment to make notes about any experiences you had. You may find it helpful to observe how easy or difficult it was to maintain a state of self-observation. Notice if this exercise is easier for you to do in the morning versus the evening, at home versus at work. Assessing these variables will help give you greater insight into your own state of mindfulness and what is helping or hindering your ability to maintain it regularly.
Aspirational Self
The Aspirational Self is really the culmination of the good work you put into the earlier exercises and an acknowledgement that your other selves are in alignment.
The Japanese call this self your ikigai, or reason for being.
Ask yourself if you have a sense of what this might be. For many of us, this idea is elusive and hard to pin down.
If you are already clear about your life’s greatest purpose, congratulations; you’re better off than most of us. But many of us are still searching or evolving our view as our lives change with time. Consider each aspect of your Whole Self as you explore your Aspirational Self. Use the diagram below to help map this aspect of your Whole Self.
Map the aspects of your own life, and see where the intersections occur. At the heart of these four parts, you’ll find the core of your Aspirational Self.
Once you discover what this is, you’ll have found your North Star, of sorts. Use it to orient your future decisions, ensuring that the choices you make are consistent with this ultimate aspect of your Whole Self and that you serve your personal pursuit of satisfaction and greater purpose.
Empathy Journal: Bringing the Whole Self and the Empathic Archetypes Together
I wanted to integrate the Seven Selves with the Seven Archetypes, and that naturally led to seven questions for each archetype, with each question inspired by one of the seven selves. This exercise is incredibly valuable, though it is a long one.
Those of you who are willing to undertake it will find that it dramatically helps evolve your perspective on empathy.
This exercise takes fifty days and begins with taking a moment to write down your definition of empathy and what it means to you.
Next identify which archetype you feel you are most closely aligned with and then the next, on through the other five, ending up with the archetype in whose behaviors you feel you are most deficient.
On the second day, go to the first question for your first archetype from the lists that begin on page 82. Answer this question, and capture your answer in the journal. On the second day, you will do the same for the second question, proceeding until all forty-nine have been addressed.
On day fifty, take a moment to capture your evolved definition of empathy and its meaning in your life.
CHAPTER FOUR
Showing Up
“I love that brand’s products.”
“That organization is far and away the best in the industry.”
“That company is praised for how it treats its employees.”
There they are: brand, organization, and company. They spill from our lips regularly when we talk about businesses and their products. But we’re missing something—or overlooking it—when we talk in this way. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we are forgetting that a “company” isn’t doing any of those things—it’s the people inside the company who make everything happen.
We know that companies are made up of people, which might seem like an overly simplistic observation. But the language most people use to talk about the business world often leaves out the people at the heart of companies. The more empathic versions are these:
“I’ve loved every product its designers create.”
“That team is far and away the best in the industry.”
“The leaders of that company are praised for how they treat their employees.”
Notice a difference? When we speak about the people within the business, not just the business itself, we add a layer of recognition and understanding of exactly whom or what we are talking about. And that’s a critical element to bear in mind as we start to think about building more effective, more empathic companies. It starts with the people inside.
When we recognize that people are at the core of every business, it becomes necessary that we show up in a different way. If we simply “phone it in,” our behavior has an impact on the company. But when we bring our best selves to the companies we serve, we can often create some pretty spectacular results.
This isn’t just something that comes from the top down. Yes, a CEO certainly has a major role to play in establishing an organization’s culture and environment, but he or she is not the only one responsible. Working with companies as small as ours and others with nearly a million employees worldwide, I’ve noted one important element that always plays a role in building a strong internal culture: alignment.
When a company’s purpose is understood—truly understood at a strategic and emotional level—it permeates everything the organization does.
SEEKING ALIGNMENT
The leaders of a global retail bank asked us to help them raise awareness of the CEO’s new mission among all their employees. They had hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who were going into work less engaged than they might have been because they didn’t have a sense of why they were going to work. Sure, they may have been clear about what job function they performed, but they didn’t know what that work meant to the company’s greater purpose, the larger goal they were all working toward. Employees of companies with great alignment are able to answer those questions quickly and easily.
O
ne of my favorite examples of this happened eighteen years before I was born, in 1962, at NASA’s Launch Operations Center on Merritt Island, Florida. The story goes that President John F. Kennedy, who the year before had established an ambitious goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade, was touring the center. At one point he saw a janitor carrying a broom past the tour group. Kennedy stopped the man and said, “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. What do you do here?” The man responded, “Well, I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
That is alignment. Whether this anecdote is true or apocryphal, the point is still clear: this is what it feels like when a company’s mission permeates into every corner of a business. People aren’t simply coming to work to perform a specific function; they are showing up, in the broadest sense of the term, bringing their full self to the entirety of the business and its mission.
The best companies do this so well that it becomes infectious. A great culture supports and encourages its team members to “show up” every day because having their full, talented selves present will make everyone better. I’ve had the good fortune of seeing this in action with some of the companies we work with, and it has also been true with my own business as we’ve evolved our own purpose and practice. It’s powerful stuff.
EVERYBODY SHOWING UP
We began our relationship with Nike well before our work on Hyperfeel. It was a damp springtime afternoon when I drove onto the Nike campus for the first time. As I turned into the main gate, I was greeted warmly by the security guard at his station. He seemed like a character you’d encounter on the grounds of Disney World, not the gatekeeper at a corporate office. He smiled and asked if I’d been to the campus before. I told him it was my first time, and he gave me a knowing look, the way someone does when he knows you’re in for a treat. I pulled into a massive parking lot and noticed a series of signs at the front. One of them read, “Reserved for Michael Jordan.” I was starstruck before I’d even made it out of the parking lot.
I parked my car humbly, a few rows away from Michael Jordan’s spot, and went to meet my clients.
Right away I noticed memorabilia from many of Nike’s athletes on display, but I also saw that Nike employees were being celebrated in the same way. I wasn’t just looking at a framed jersey from an Olympic gold medal soccer team; I was seeing the cleats designed on this campus for the athlete who had worn the jersey. The athlete and the people who had created the product were on the same pedestal. There were photos from the innovation sessions alongside photos of the athlete on the playing field. The way it was presented, sharing both sides of the story, made it clear that the medal had been won because everyone had shown up.
Over the years that we’ve worked with the Nike brand, I’ve always been impressed by the company’s knack for demonstrating that everyone’s role is important. Everyone is part of the team. And everyone is expected to show up and give his or her best. The company culture has a definite athleticism, and it extends way beyond physically playing sports. Employees do play sports and work out together, and the campus is beautifully designed with soccer fields, putting greens, gyms, tracks and more, but the sense of teamwork comes through in the way they speak to one another and engage in work. It’s spirited, and I’ve been in conference room meetings with them that felt like a locker room before a big game. The teams I’ve worked with at Nike were aligned to the greater mission established by the company’s founders.
Nike’s mission is “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” When Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman was asked to define “athlete,” he said, “If you have a body, you’re an athlete.” That is why Nike’s culture is so powerful. Bowerman democratized athleticism. You might not be the next LeBron James or Serena Williams, but you’re still important to the brand. Your ability to perform better and more comfortably, to have empathy for your inner athlete no matter your skill level, is meaningful. And the fact that the company’s employees understand that importance, and come to work every day, whether it’s in marketing, design, or accounting, is what makes its culture so powerful.
But doing what Nike does is not easy. There are challenges to building an empathic culture in an environment as demanding and high intensity as Nike’s. After all, it is an athletic wear company. The teams work hard, and they expect the best from their colleagues. It’s not for everyone. In our time working for clients that have strong alignment, I’ve seen people leave because they weren’t the right fit. And that’s okay. Not every organization is a perfect fit for every employee. This sort of tension often arises when a company’s culture starts to become more clearly defined, felt, and lived by its people.
ONE COMPANY, MANY SIDES
Empathic company cultures help teams understand their external audiences—groups such as shareholders, the media, consumers, and more—but they can influence the internal audience as well. Such companies, and the teams within them, know how to connect their mission with all of their different audiences in a meaningful way.
Imagine that your company is a cube, with its six sides each representing a part that contributes to the whole. The sides might be things such as your product, the company’s financial health, its internal culture, and so on. Together they make your company whole.
Empathic employees in an organization know that all sides are important, but they also know which side connects best and most crucially with each particular audience. If a reporter from the Financial Times sits down with a CEO, it makes sense that he or she is looking for sound bites about the company’s financials. But if the same CEO was being interviewed by a reporter from Fast Company or Harvard Business Review, it wouldn’t be appropriate to focus only on financials, as those sorts of publications often report on a variety of topics related to business. Thus the reporter might be looking for a more nuanced picture of the CEO or a better sense of the company’s culture. That’s an empathic behavior I’ve often seen lacking in the leaders of companies. Too often, people have been overly trained to cover the points they want to talk about with the media and what they think is most important, with little consideration for what the interviewer might want to discuss. Empathically meeting a reporter’s needs early in the conversation increases the chances that he or she will feel understood. It also builds trust, as the reporter will likely sense that you understand the publication and its objective. That, in turn, can often create empathy in the other direction—piquing the curiosity of the reporter and giving the interviewee room to discuss other aspects of the business that he or she deems important. This isn’t complicated, but it is a muscle many leaders don’t train often enough.
I host a monthly podcast at Sub Rosa called Applied Empathy, which we record in front of a live audience. Every month, we bring in two to four people who have a specific point of view, and we dig into it with them, looking to reveal different perspectives, different “sides of the cube” of topics such as beauty, creativity, or wellness. Moderating is something I’ve come to enjoy, but I found it difficult in the beginning because I was coming up against the same tension I described in the example of the reporter. Some panelists can’t help but try to steer the conversation toward a talking point they want to get across.
As a moderator, my job is to keep us on topic while also empathically trying to bring out new and different views of a story that our listeners want to hear. Our most successful podcasts have been the ones that give listeners the fullest picture of a topic. The more diverse the panelists, the more conflicting their views, the better the audience responds. Our listeners gain a more all-encompassing sense of empathy for a topic or an industry when they can hear about it from all of its different sides.
The same is true within companies. The best leaders act empathically toward all sides of their business, and they do the same toward the company’s key audiences. Your company might be as simple as a cube or as complex as a dodecahedron. It doesn’t matter; the work is still the same. It takes time to understand each audience—to get outside of you
r own perspective and see the company from the point of view of investors, media, employees, potential employees, and more. Once you do, you can more deftly uncover gaps in the company’s messaging, misalignments in its operations, or dysfunctions in its culture. All sides of the business need to work in harmony, aligned toward the same mission and goals.
EXCAVATING EMPATHY
Sometimes at Sub Rosa we do this work overtly. We talk to different audiences about the product or service being offered. It’s important to focus on their perspective as a way of figuring out why they feel the way they do. This kind of investigative work, which involves letting go of preconceptions, can be difficult for people inside the company because their closeness to the intricacies of the business can create blind spots. But with practice it is doable, and a good tool for this is the Empathic Archetypes, which help people assume different perspectives and behaviors as a way of shaking them out of any overly defined point of view they may have.
The Cultivator, for example, whose behavior is to “commit” and see the long game, can be a helpful perspective to assume when important near-term decisions need to be made. At moments like this, we often focus on what the immediate ramifications will be. How will this decision change my business today? Tomorrow? In the next quarter? People rarely zoom out several years ahead to consider how a decision today will be felt then. But doing so can provide helpful insights. Big thinkers such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk have often acted as Cultivators. Their bets have always been big, far-reaching, and based on where they see the world going in five, ten, maybe even twenty-plus years’ time. It’s a perspective that doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but with training and repetition, it can help you see your desired future state more clearly.
Applied Empathy Page 8
