Year: 2021

In seeing more articles of anti-vaxxers harassing restaurants in Vancouver this morning because of the vaccine mandate, I started pondering more about what is psychologically going on in their heads to make them think and react in this way. And it made me realize that something way, way deeper is going on inside them, beyond what they are saying on the surface of their arguments.

Their number one argument is that society is not respecting their choice to not get vaccinated, thus society is trying to “control” them and making them feel like the Jews in “Nazi Germany” (as quoted in the article linked above).

Yet what I find amazing about their mindset is that it shows just how selfish they are in not respecting other people’s lives by not getting the vaccine. This is pretty much the number one thing vaccinated people are saying about anti-vaxxers now. Forget freedom of choice, how about the freedom to actually live your life without someone else carelessly jeopardizing it (especially since younger generations are now the greatest worry, since they can’t be vaccinated yet).

Yet what I find remarkable is how these anti-vaxxers are handling these protests. They are harassing and even threatening people, sometimes with their lives. So yes, it does sound like “Nazi Germany” but with the anti-vaxxers being the ones creating scapegoats (ie restaurants, school boards, and even nurses now) and using intimidation practices on them. Perhaps they need to look in the mirror more and reflect on their own actions.

What’s evidently clear here is anti-vaxxers aren’t just upset about their freedom of choice, they are psychologically feeling like their very lives are being threatened which is why they are responding so angrily and threateningly. The question is why?

For myself, I believe they are undergoing a greater existential crisis that relates to how our world is changing so rapidly and they don’t have the psychological capacity to make sense of it. To cope with the change, they are psychologically regressing back to a lower level of consciousness, which is quite common for people to do during times of crisis, when they feel like they are losing control of their sense of identity and their worldview.

This is why they are acting more authoritarian, angry, and aggressive, because in doing so, it gives back a greater sense of control in their lives again that counteracts what they feel like they are losing. Unfortunately this only speeds up the process of disintegration as I’ve noted before. For example, managers who feel like their organizations are falling apart will become more controlling, thus speeding up the disintegration of their organization because it’s actually their controlling nature that’s causing its downfall and upsetting their employees.

This is the paradox and paradigm shift that people often can’t comprehend about the future. It is a world in which we will be able to take greater control of our lives by reducing the controls in our society. Yet for that empowering shift to occur requires individuals who have a higher degree of responsibility, much more so than today.

And thus we return to where we are today. A world full of people who demand their God given freedoms but without being willing to take any responsibility for those freedoms. This is why we have governments and laws. And it’s why governments have to enforce stupid vaccine mandates, after giving people tons of time to step up and be responsible. Yet when they don’t, when they only think about themselves and are psychologically blind to what they are doing to others, that’s when harsh, strong choices have to be made for them.

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Viktor Frankl

Companies Are Giving Lip Service to “Self-Care”—but It’s Not What Employees Really Need

Meditation tips and yoga breaks aren’t helping.

slate.com

But it can be hard to see those gestures as genuine, given that the same employers often expect people to work too many hours without breaks, discourage them from taking real time off, and ignore the stressors in their employees’ lives, from lack of child care to not earning a living wage.

Irritatingly, the push for self-care often burdens employees with additional demands on their time while preventing them from doing the work that could actually relieve some of their stress.

Moreover, the push for reflection and self-care is often remarkably out-of-touch with the realities of employees’ lives…

What’s perhaps most frustrating about the workplace self-care lip service is that often the employers espousing it aren’t doing the things they actually could do to improve employees’ lives and mental health, like providing good health insurance, reasonable workloads, and plentiful vacation time. Those are things they’re uniquely positioned to offer … but it’s easier (read: cheaper) to send out emails about yoga or bubble baths.

The key emphasis here is that these additional demands take even more of people’s time which makes things even worse for them. In effect, that’s the biggest problem. People are already overloaded with having to work in different ways due to the pandemic and they lack the time and space to stay afloat mentally and emotionally, let alone have the time for self-care.

My wife is a school teacher and she’s experiencing this same very thing at work. Her administration is saying that they “care about their mental health” in one sentence and then overloading them with more emails to read and additional tasks to perform in the next sentence.

What people need to be given right now is more time and space, not less, to mentally and emotionally process what they’re going through. Anything else is effectively just “lip service” and shows that you actually don’t care about the mental health and well-being of your own people over your own needs and profits.

This is what’s really behind the Great Resignation

On the latest episode of The New Way We Work we find out why so many people are quitting and how managers can get them to stay.

www.fastcompany.com

Although labor shortages in the service industry might be the most visible, Vozza pointed out that tech and healthcare have actually seen the most people quit in the last few months, and burnout has been one of the driving reasons. As for the other reasons? While lack of childcare options and low wages are at the heart of many job vacancies, the other reasons people are quitting en masse are the same reasons people have always left their jobs: lack of flexibility and lack of opportunity—meaning, lack of work-life balance.

The pandemic has caused a lot of us to refocus and reevaluate our priorities, and the old adage, “You don’t quit a job, you quit a manager,” has never been more true. If managers want to hold onto their employees, they should listen closely to what they want, especially when it comes to remote work.

Well, they need to go beyond just listening and act upon what they’re hearing, making changes to their work environments to show that they not only are listening to their needs but understanding the meaning of them as well. Saying “we’re listening & we care” repeatedly really doesn’t mean anything if nothing changes.

Unfortunately for most management this will be really difficult to do because it means changing their own identity and beliefs. So instead of trying to “take control of things” all the more to show that they are competent and “in charge”, they actually need to start letting go of that control and power, taking leadership by redistributing that power to their people to create a large sense of collective leadership instead.

Place, Personhood, and the Hippocampus: The Fascinating Science of Magnetism, Autonoeic Consciousness, and What Makes Us Who We Are

“Often the places we grow up in… influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us.”

www.brainpickings.org

The hippocampus has sometimes been described as the human GPS, but this metaphor is reductive compared to what this remarkable, plastic part of our minds accomplishes. While a GPS identifies fixed positions or coordinates in space that never change, neuroscientists think what the hippocampus does is unique to us as individuals — it builds representations of places based on our point of view, experiences, memories, goals, and desires. It provides the infrastructure for our selfhood.

Because a self is a pattern of experiences, memories, and impressions, constellated according to an organizing principle, and because sleep is when the hippocampus consolidates memories to draw from them those organizing patterns, sleep is essential to our sense of self.

During sleep you try to make sense of things you already learned… You go into a vast database of experience and try to figure out new connections and then build a model to explain new experiences. Wisdom is the rules, based on experience, that allows us to make good decisions in novel situations in the future.

What most people aren’t aware of is that they are navigating their life by their worldview which is a metaphorical map or GPS that helps them makes sense of their world. This worldview has evolved and expanded since they were a child. And right now, it is trying to expand as well.

Why? Because while it may have worked two to three decades ago, it’s slowly been getting more and more outdated the more our world increasingly changes around us. So what worked to 30 to 40 years ago, will probably no longer work today. The times have changed and we all need to upgrade and adapt.

This is something I’ve laughed about for the last couple of decades. We often love newer technological innovations, upgrading them every year, but how often do we upgrade and socially innovate our own beliefs, behaviours, and sense of identity? Very rarely. Often because it can be very traumatic to let go of an old sense of self and fall back into a larger one. It requires a very large sense of trust in yourself which is difficult.

Speaking from my own experiences over the past couple of decades, levelling up your sense of self can be very mentally and emotionally exhausting. It’s why I personally found sleep to be essential as well, even taking midday naps when I had the opportunity. Not just to recuperate from the “disintegration and reintegration” of one’s self but because I’ve found sleep and dreams to be a way of roleplaying through the trauma.

For example, I remember one dream where one experience after another put me within increasingly worse social situations that were impossible to resolve. The next morning I woke up and was like, “How the hell am I supposed to resolve a no win situation like that?” But then I realized that I wasn’t supposed to. The dream was effectively a Kobayashi Maru that was effectively testing how I reacted to a no win social situation.

More specifically though the dream was teaching me how to let go of the societal expectations upon me that were both crushing and impeding me from my own further growth and development. In effect, you have this internal tug of war with yourself until you realize that growing beyond your current identity and pattern of beliefs isn’t making you a heretic to society but rather a hero in the psychologically sense. Because only by growing beyond the basic need to fit in, can you truly stand out and discover your unique gifts that you can help the world with in a much larger way.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason

Philosopher of science Lee McIntyre shares 5 key insights from his new book, How to Talk to a Science Denier.

nextbigideaclub.com

Jonathan Swift once said that you cannot reason somebody out of something they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place. But if a denier’s belief is not based on evidence, then what is it based on? The answer is identity.

A denier will often tell you that they’re convinced by the evidence, but when you then ask them, “OK, so what evidence could convince you that you were wrong?” they have nothing to say. This precise thing happened to me when I visited the Flat Earth International Conference in Denver, Colorado in 2018. Although I didn’t convince any Flat Earthers to give up their views on the spot, I did learn that by letting them talk, then asking questions, I could get them to listen to what I had to say. I came away with the feeling that what they were missing was not a proper set of facts, but a sense of trust. They felt alienated and displaced from the larger culture, which was full of elites and experts who were condescending to them and always telling them what to do. In this environment, they felt justified in clinging to outlandish beliefs that defined an alternative community and identity. They thought that the experts and scientists were lying to them, and that the world was filled with either conspirators or sheep.

In some ways, they honestly believed that they were being more scientific than the scientists. That’s why you have to be careful not to shove facts down a science denier’s throat. If you want to convince them, you have to focus not just on what they believe, but why they believe it. Always remember that denialist views are not just what they believe—it’s who they are.

In trying to talk to people like this, I find I lose my patience almost immediately because more often than not, any “facts” they provide to try to refute my facts are often incorrect because they’re usually misinterpreting the meaning of what’s being said by the experts. Often it’s because they are just looking at one fact and base most of their argument on it, rather than looking at all of the facts all together and seeing the bigger picture (which is often highly complex).

What is evidently clear in discussions with them though is a repeated emphasis on wanting “freedom” and “choice”, as well as a disdain for an opposing force trying to “control” them. So I’m noticing the same thing as well. This has very little to do with facts and more to do with their sense of identity which is feeling jeopardized and lost by external forces beyond their control. And notice how closely this symbolically describes the pandemic overall which is why many deny the reality and severity of it.

In Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey’s book Immunity to Change, they talk about this exact very same thing. In a world which is rapidly changing, they talk about how we need to change with it, transitioning and transforming ourselves in the process. But often we can’t and the primary reason why is because our current sense of self-identity is actually impeding us from doing so (which is why creativity to me is the ability to “step out of your own way”).

But your identity, comprised of your current worldview, is not doing this to be malicious. It’s actually doing it as a built in defence mechanism. In effect, our identity’s “immunity system” is trying to protect and preserve itself and you along with it. Yet in doing so, it’s standing in the way of our own growth and development, even when we may have a strong desire to change (as I can attest to myself).

So the obstacles we often face to change aren’t fact-based but identity-based. So until we can go below the surface of ourselves and see how our patterns of belief are no longer helping us but hampering our growth, we won’t be able to course correct and navigate a new path for ourselves.

Changing your mind about something as important as vaccination isn’t a sign of weakness – being open to new information is the smart way to make choices

People tend to stick with their stated beliefs. But here’s how external forces like vaccine mandates can push people to do something they don’t want to do – and provide some face-saving cover.

theconversation.com

Social psychologists know that, on the one hand, people are motivated to maintain consistency across their beliefs. Because people want their web of beliefs to be coherent, they tend to give a lot of weight to beliefs that are consistent with their overall worldview and to discount those that are contradictory. As a result, people will continue to hold on to a set of beliefs even in the face of mounting evidence that they should revise what they think.

Psychologists describe this unconscious strategy as a way for people to minimize any cognitive dissonance they experience – when things don’t add up, it can be disturbing, so to avoid those uncomfortable feelings, they ignore what doesn’t fit well with their existing beliefs as a way to maintain balance.

In the context of COVID-19, for example, someone who is predisposed to dislike the vaccine will give little weight to new evidence of vaccine effectiveness, because that evidence contradicts their current worldview.

Eventually, though, enough counterevidence can lead to what psychologists call a shift in coherence, in which people can come to believe that their initial viewpoint was wrong.

When environments change a lot, exploration is important. Good decision-makers will often forego the best-known option in order to determine whether other options are now actually better.

In these situations, helping people to change behavior requires reducing their need to feel bound to act in a way that is consistent with the attitudes they have expressed

More generally, people are creatures of habit. You likely feel most comfortable doing what has worked for you in the past. The more you learn to pay attention to how much change there is in the environment, the more you can work to push yourself to explore new options and change your beliefs and behavior based on new evidence.

This is one of the predominant myths of conventional minds. They believe that changing your mind is a “sign of weakness”, as it signifies you’re all over the place and “aren’t really standing behind your beliefs.” While this can be true for someone who changes their mind repeatedly, back and forth, to suit their needs in the moment, for someone who explores and sees a change in their environment and thus permanently changes their own beliefs and values to match it, this pivot is more commonly known as psychological growth, whereby one expands one’s worldview in the process.

In fact, as I’ve noted to others before, psychological growth and development actually requires these paradoxical shifts to occur at certain stages in one’s life, as the expansion of one’s worldview frees the individual from their past beliefs which are no longer empowering them but are actually limiting them.

Of course this can be confusing and disorienting to the individual who navigates their life with their beliefs. But once they recognize their outdated beliefs are no longer working for the current reality they are living within (like an outdated GPS), they in time will see that updating their beliefs as an empowering act, rather than a sacrilegious one. In effect, after going through one of these psychological paradoxical shifts, everything will make perfect sense upon reflection within their newer worldview.

To fight burnout, workers can’t allow well-being to feel like another to-do

In her book ‘The Burnout Epidemic,’ author Jennifer Moss describes a crisis in well-being as a result of workers being stretched to their limits.

www.fastcompany.com

…we’ll lose nearly $1 trillion in productivity globally each year, spend $190 billion in healthcare outlays, and 120,000 people will die from burnout in the United States alone.

“These survey responses make it clear that a lot of people are having serious disruptions in their relationship with work,” Leiter noted. “It’s not surprising that people are more exhausted —people are working hard to keep their work and personal lives afloat. But the rise in cynicism is even more troubling. Cynicism reflects a lack of trust in the world. So many people feel let down by their government’s poor preparation for the pandemic, as well as by the injustices in work and well-being that the pandemic has highlighted.”

Millennials have the highest levels of burnout, we found. Much of this is due to having less autonomy at work, lower seniority, and greater financial stressors and feelings of loneliness. The last was the biggest factor leading to burnout, according to our research. As one millennial put it: “The pandemic has had a tremendous impact on my well-being—I’ve had mental health challenges, and I’ve hit major roadblocks with that. My physical health has changed because I can’t exercise like I used to. It’s affected me economically. I feel as though my career has been set back yet again.”

One executive at a global accounting firm shared with me that her company recently offered everyone access to a meditation app. After a series of emails from corporate reminding her about all the cool features and benefits the app could offer, she still couldn’t find the time to log on. The executive says that if she has time left in the day, it goes to jamming a granola bar in her mouth and getting to the bathroom. She laughs, “It’s just so ironic. Shouldn’t they make this place less stressful so I don’t need an app to calm down? It all feels a bit tonedeaf.”

From our research, I learned that a big predictor for well-being at work during times of stress was trust and communication.

I learned that this trust would have been built up long before the crisis hit. But it could be developed with frequent and humble communication.

A little bit less than a year ago, we entered a pandemic. At the time, we naively believed this was a public health crisis and indeed it is a public health crisis that continues to today. But it’s also uncovered another number of crises. Crises that are economic in nature. Crises that are political in nature. Crises that are exacerbated by inequalities. Crises that are connected to our climate issues. And so we have seen as the waters have receded is more and more of these crises brought to the surface.

How will we solve these crises? Well, doing a little bit better, maybe a little bit more efficiently, best practices will get us a little bit of the way. But clearly it will take new thinking and innovation. And so this session is going to be thinking about innovation. But what kind of innovation and with what values.

Peter Tufano

We want to talk about the ways that social entrepreneurs can be the sort of people that can help us get out of this and help us think about how we might make a world that’s fit for purpose in the 21st century because I think there is one thing we can all agree on is that “business as usual” is no longer getting it done.

Peter Drobac

I’ve been toiling in the field of social innovation for two, two plus decades now and you know the animating feature of social innovation is this recognition, this clear-eyed recognition, that the current systems are not working or not working for enough of us. But there is a real animating feature to try to fix, repair, rebuild, reimagine those systems to make them more inclusive and provide more opportunity for all.

But the diagnosis that these systems aren’t working is the same diagnosis that we see from those who are animated from populist anger. So we come at the problem from the same vantage point. The way we have constructed societal forces are simply not working.

I often talk about the weight of systems, systems residue that is weighting folks down: people of colour, marginalized folks, poor folks, women. We can go through all these forms of oppression and these systems are exacerbating those. So we all see it. However our prescription for what to do about it is radically different.

Social innovators recognize that indeed there’s a problem but they raise their hands as engaged committed citizens to say, “Well it’s our job to fix it. We roll up our sleeves, we get to work, and we figure out what we can do.” So much of the populist anger is a nihilistic one as you said Peter, it’s a blow it all up, consequences be damned.

And these conflicting forces that are butting heads, there has to be a way to engage more folks from the other side who are frustrated as many of us are who are engaged in the work of social innovation but do it within the realm of democratic practice that provides a seat for all of us at the table. I think that’s the needle to thread. And I think we’ve got to figure it out and we got to figure it out sooner than later.

Cheryl Dorsey

As a fellow recovering doctor, I use a lot of medical metaphors and sometimes talk about you know these issues as being deep wounds were trying to sort of paper over with band-aids and really just treating the symptoms. And what social entrepreneurs and social innovators do is really try to understand what’s driving these problems at their root causes. And try to impact those systems and those deep structural forces, treating the system rather than the symptoms.

Peter Drobac

Two Warning Signs Told Us That The Great Resignation Was Coming

For all the hand wringing about the current “Great Resignation,” the reality is that we should have seen this coming.

www.forbes.com

For all the hand wringing about the current “Great Resignation,” the reality is that we should have seen this coming. Long before the pandemic, there were signs that more than a few employees were unhappy. And as the pandemic progressed, even more worrying signals emerged.

These are just two of the warning signs that the Great Resignation was imminent; there are dozens more. The point, however, is that the current exodus was predictable. Whether we discovered this through surveys or simply listening to employees, the signs were there. The big question for every executive moving forward is whether we want to start listening to avoid this problem again in the future.

Note how this “ignoring of reality” within the workplace over the past couple of decades shows the cognitive dissonance of management in these companies. In effect, they didn’t want to believe that things were beginning to fall apart and no longer working effectively, which would mean that they weren’t effective at their job anymore, so they just ignored it and believed that everything was fine. But you can only ignore reality for so long.

And a further downside of this is that the more things fall apart, the more management will try to take more control of things, thus making things worse because it causes more burnout of staff who actually want management to let go of control, giving them the autonomy and responsibility to do their work on their own through a collective sense of leadership instead.

For myself, these signs have been blatantly obvious since the Dot-Com Bubble burst in 2001 and they’ve only been building since then. So the pandemic isn’t causing these issues in the workplace today. All it’s doing is bringing them all to the surface so that they can no longer be ignored. That’s because whereas before people’s livelihoods we’re on the line in the past, now their literal lives are on the line and it’s making them question everything about their world and the way work has been done within it.