This article first appeared on LinkedIn on January 31, 2022. For the most current article, check out my LinkedIn blog and subscribe!

Coaching often feels to me like partnering with a client to look out on the future by focusing our perceptions through the window of the present. For me as a coach, this mostly involves making sure I stay very close to that window. I need to be intent on the present moment in order to help get that window as clear as possible. I like to think I’m helping clients get the best view. For clients, it’s more complicated. They don’t only live in the present, but also through their past. And of course it’s *their* future that is the goal of our conversations.

The Stoics demand that we take a good, long look at our perceptions of the present. The universe is causal, so the decisions and actions we take now based on our perceptions are also the circumstances and contexts of tomorrow. But this isn’t just a moral imperative for ourselves, because we affect other people’s circumstances and choices too. Chew on this for a minute: are you limiting or expanding possibilities for people around you with your behaviors?

This feels like a LOT of pressure. But it’s always been true … what awareness brings is a new sense of responsibility and agency, not an actual new responsibility or agency. How do I understand the full range of choices open to me at any given time? What is the inter-relationship between “What am I”, “What is up to me”, “What effect do my circumstances have” and “What is my purpose in acting”? These are the lens of Stoic coaching. 

The Four-Personae Theory, preserved in Cicero from one of his teachers, Panaetius, offers a way to understand those four questions. For the Stoic Panaetius, human beings are social animals, naturally placed within family and social contexts. We live our lives influenced by external circumstances of all kinds. But these circumstances (family, geography, environment, class, etc.), while they are inevitable and shape our behaviors and perspectives, do not eliminate our agency. And because they do not eliminate our agency, we must meet the moral and spiritual challenge of responding fully to what we are, to our human nature.

For the Stoics, that human nature was to live according to reason (intellectual and emotional), to evaluate our perceptions, emotions, and beliefs in order to do the appropriate thing in every circumstance. And no, that does not mean squashing all emotions. Sometimes the appropriate thing to do grieve, or love, or dance with joy, or be angry. The real question is how much and for how long. What do you believe our common human nature demands from us? What are you?

The four Personae (four roles or identities) present a system that can account for our circumstances and current behaviors while giving us the agency to change. And this way of thinking about our self also gives us space to clean that window on our future self, on the possibilities.

The first identity is the individual as a human being. A human being is rational, emotional, self-directing, self-aware, social, with an inborn sense of virtue. You might have the same definition of “human” as the Stoics or a different one. But if you don’t know what your definition is, how can you live into your humanity fully? 

The second identity is the individual as an agent/actor. We all make choices about how to act. In fact, many, many things we do every day — while they feel automatic or habitual — began at some point as a choice. Which shoe did you put on first today, left or right? Of course, most of these things are automatized because we would find it very hard to function given the number of “decisions” we have to make — the brain is amazing — but that doesn’t mean we can’t make a choice. And yes, which shoe I put on first hardly carries huge moral weight. Other automatized decisions (like bias) do. Emotional intelligence, mindfulness … these skills invite us to find that tiny gap between perception and reaction so we can choose our action. Someone says something to me that I feel is disrespectful — I flush, I feel like I’ve been insulted, then pause — the gap allows me to judge more accurately and then respond appropriately instead of just automatically being rude back or inwardly hurt. Becoming aware that I can make that kind of a choice, that I have agency in my own life, is a huge step toward positive change.

The third identity involves our past and current circumstances. Where and to whom were we born? What have we experienced, felt, endured, embraced? All of these things have shaped us as individuals. Some have come to us by our own choices; many have just happened to us because of the choices of others. But all of them have significance for who we are in this moment now and how we will make choices now. How does this identity shape who you are now? More to the point, how does it color the glass through which you are looking at your future?

The fourth identity is in essence the person on the other side of the window. It is the kind of person we want to be, a choice of living. What do you want for yourself? How does what you want for yourself impact how you deal with the world or treat other people? 

And here is the crux of the problem, friends, and what a good coach can help with. How can you become aware of different possibilities if your circumstances limit your view of them? 

As usual, Stoicism leads us to a set of conclusions about life or humanity, and then asks, “What’s ‘up to you’?” Anyone who has spent time with Stoicism as a holistic philosophical system understands why that must be the question. But it’s pretty damn annoying for everyone else. Here’s the thing though: while you are who you are because of a range of things (genetics, society, religion, etc.), you are STILL making choices about many, many more things than you think you are. The system with which we navigate the world (our brain and body) makes it easy to assume many things that we do are not choices, like what shoe we put on first … or how we perceive a group of young people having fun together. When we are socialized and conditioned in certain ways, can we break free by understanding what is up to us and choosing to act? I believe that we can, and I’ll bet a coaching agreement on it.

I have found that many Stoic ideas are very attractive to people. These ideas initially make a lot of sense and drive positive growth, partly because the Stoics are cosmic optimists. They assume the best is not only possible, but it is our purpose in living. But there is almost always a point when a person says, “Whoa! What?” as the consequence of a certain Stoic idea plays out fully. Embracing our human nature is like that. If our nature is to be intellectual and emotional reasoning animals who make our own choices … what are you choosing to do today? More is ‘up to you’ than you might think or want.

So, could a full response to our human nature make greater demands on us than our social conditioning and personal boundaries have prepared us to accept? For most people, I’d say that’s a full-on “Yes”. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible or not desirable to be fully human, just hard.  If you could look through your window and see a better path, one that maybe is less easy to walk, would you take it? Seneca once asked a friend, “Can you reach a mountaintop by walking on flat ground?” If you want to be better and do better, it turns out you need to do that work yourself. But you don’t have to do it alone.

Confidence. My sense is that this is one of those qualities that often teeters on the edge between positive and negative or is a proxy for other qualities or states of mind that are harder to describe. I’ve been in many conversations with colleagues and clients over the last couple of weeks where a lack of confidence has come up. For some, it has been in the context of their professional goals as they move into new roles or companies. For others it has been connected to return-to-office and all the many, many complexities some industries face in navigating the return to face-to-face workspaces.

I’d often thought of confidence as a kind of personal bravery. But the more I work with Emotional Intelligence frameworks (both ancient and modern), the more I realize it’s not really that at all. Confidence, I now think, is the “accurate assessment of one’s abilities and capacities relative to the problem or task one faces.” This definition resonates because it helps also explain over-confidence and lack of confidence.

For the work I do with Team Emotional Intelligence, the key part of this definition is actually “accurate”. Like almost everything in EI development, awareness plays an enormous role in assessment. We can develop awareness in many ways, but one of the desired effects is accuracy in perception and judgment. The link between this problem of confidence and EI development became clear to me after I was debriefing on a recent Team EI development project I ran for an academic team at a regional comprehensive. It was clear that the development program had led the team to understand their individual and collective EI much more accurately. And at the end of the program, the team expressed a confidence – they felt empowered – to adopt a set of norms (behaviors) and shared understanding as they transition out of remote work into face-to-face … some of them working face-to-face for the first time.

At the beginning of their work, the team members all completed an EI self-assessment. There were several stages of the project following Inner Citadel Consulting’s “Notice-Engage-Empower” model, the last stage of which included peer, external, and self-assessments for the team using the same tool. What was remarkable to me was the shift in the self-assessments after the development program, which brought the self-assessment scores in line with the peer assessment scores.

The first time through, about 90% of the team rated their own EI behaviors well below average. This was a little shocking to me, because my personal interactions with the team and the interviews I did with each of them had suggested a very high average Team Emotional Intelligence. The remaining 10% rated themselves much higher than average. After the development program, that same 90% assessed themselves on average a full point higher on the five-point scale across all six competencies. And the 10%? They assessed themselves a full point lower. The EI development program and the increasing self-awareness of the team had mitigated their self-perception, bringing them up and in line with the peer and external raters.

What does this mean? Well, I think it shows the power of even a short development program to promote accurate assessments of one’s own abilities and capacities. Both those who adjusted up and those who adjusted down were adjusting toward the judgment of everyone else who works with them. It’s not just that they became more realistic about their (excellent) EI skills – it’s that their accurate understanding of their capacities now places them in a position of confidence to face the challenges of return-to-office as a team.

When I’ve spoken with clients and colleagues about this massive new disruption toward a “back to normal” workplace (the irony is poignant), the kinds of reluctance and hesitancy about the return are often expressed as a lack of confidence. Sometimes that’s based on accurate judgment – we just don’t know, for example, what the next 6 months will bring. But more often it stems from inaccurate assessments of the challenges, the complexities, and our own abilities, from people’s confidence in leaders to make good decisions or from leaders’ confidence in their people to work effectively wherever they are.

For anyone struggling with confidence, personal or corporate, take some time to build your awareness of the circumstances, to use your emotional reasoning (or to develop your emotional intelligence) and strive for an accurate assessment of your capacities relative to the problems you face. We don’t always need to be brave – what’s wrong with being confident?

Our capacity to reason, intellectually and emotionally, is our human superpower.

VUCA and OODA are acronyms you have probably run across in your leadership training. Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity — these define our lives now during the pandemic, but they were always part of our lives. It’s true that the speed of change has increased, and that volatility is more intense and perhaps even more broadly consequential than a century ago. But this experience of the world is not a new one. Observe, Orientate, Decide, Act — a decision loop developed by USAF Col. John Boyd that has been adopted by leaders in some industries to help mitigate the VUCA-ness of life and work. Discussions of OODA I’ve seen don’t always dig into the core of Boyd’s model, Orientate, in which he outlined five dimensions at play, nor do they always underscore how many internal feedback-loops he outlined. But the basic idea, that we seek information, consider it, and then decide to act is not a strange one.

In fact, that basic sequence is the core of Inner Citadel Consulting’s system: Notice, Engage, Empower. What is brilliant about Boyd’s method as a response to difficult and complex situations is how much the decision process slows in the middle. Orientate is not one thing — it is a full and detailed consideration of many factors that influence a single moment. Orientate suspends the moment so that we can turn it and look at it from all sides. It makes total sense to me, from my background in tai chi as a martial art and my mindfulness practice, to counter volatility with deceleration. It is also intelligent, cognitively and emotionally. And it reflects the basic concepts embedded in Stoic psychology of perception and decision-making.

VUCA describes a situation, an evolving circumstance, in which the complexity of decision-making is made even more difficult to manage. OODA describes a solution to complex decision-making, of which the most significant part falls into Orientate. What I’ll lay out below is another way to approach such a solution. The thing I find most limiting about OODA is the relative lack of attention to the emotional response to VUCA. Cultural traditions, genetic heritage, previous experience, new knowledge, analysis & synthesis — very rational considerations. But not fully human without consideration of emotional experience and values. Believe it or not, Stoicism is in fact all about emotional value, not emotional suppression. Anyway, what I mean here is not that we need to integrate the expression of emotions, but we need to figure out the way in which the emotional response is not accounted for in the OODA loop. OODA privileges intellectual reason but does not fully account for emotional reason.

I suggested that ambiguous, volatile, and uncertain, complex moments are not new to the human being. Thinking about a solution for such moments is not new either. The Stoics framed a psychology of decision-making that, like the OODA loop, encourages us to decelerate and evaluate. Now, their particular solution to complex decision-making is tied up in a number of basic philosophical assumptions, such as strict materialism and a kind of cosmic optimism and providential worldview. This is all very interesting stuff and can get very distracting, but the upshot for this discussion is that the Stoic solution to complex decisions is ethical first and foremost– it places all ownership and responsibility for a decision and an action on the decision-maker. This ethical decision-making necessarily involves the whole human being in the decision.

For the Stoics, human beings receive input not just from our senses but also from our thoughts & feelings. These sensory inputs form “impressions”, which are then “perceived” by our minds. The difference between the sensory input and a perception is very important, because while an object or event might produce the same basic impression for a number of people, we might each perceive something very different. When we perceive these impressions, especially of certain kinds of things (unfortunately, often the exact things that are surrounded in complexity), we eventually make evaluative judgements (this is good, this is bad, this hurts, this feels good). We could verbalize these perceptions and judgements, although we often process them far too quickly to even notice what’s going on much less put it into words. “There is a donut on the plate,” and suddenly the donut is in my hand and I’m eating — this is a series of impressions, perceptions, evaluative judgements, and (in the end) actions. At a minimum, I would have to have evaluated the donut as something I can eat. When we perceive and perform these evaluative judgments (what we might call intellectual and emotional judgments), according to the Stoics, we also can agree or not with the evaluation. They call this assent.

Assent is the moment when, in this Stoic model, we can decelerate, slow down, examine the complexity. Without this capacity to decelerate — where we engage our full, human reason through intellect and emotion, we are simply animalistic, living only, I suppose, by instinct. For example, I see or smell or touch or think about the donut; I perceive it as a donut (as opposed to a bagel, or some other circular object); consciously or not I evaluate the “donut-event”, let’s call it; and then I act. I don’t just start eating it when I perceive it, like a dog chasing a squirrel. I must “assent” to any number of evaluative judgments. For example, that donuts are good for eating, that I like donuts of certain kinds, that this is a donut of one of the kinds I like, (maybe) that it’s good to eat when hungry, or that a donut would be a good thing to eat right now, or that donuts make me happy and I feel sad right now … and so on, all the way to me licking my sticky fingers and wondering where the donut went. And this is the place where many of my decisions become ethical. “Was that the right thing to do?” “Was that even my donut to eat?” It’s also the place where I can make really terrible mistakes, and where we all act out of unconscious bias.

Assent for the Stoics created a belief, and the belief always precipitated an impulse to act. In simple terms, when I assented at every stage in the example above, I affirmed my belief, and that belief led to another perception and another evaluation, assent, belief… all the way to the final act of eating and the consequence. At any point in the chain of perceptions and evaluations we have the capacity not only to verify the perception factually as much as possible but also to verify the evaluations emotionally, through emotional reasoning. Not only, “Am I hungry? Do I need these kinds of calories?”, but also, “What am I feeling when I see the donut? Do I really want the donut or something else? How will Sam feel about me eating the last donut?” The Stoics assert that when we assent to our evaluation, we affirm our belief in the evaluation, and an impulse to act arises. But they allow us to engage our humanity, to pause in assenting to an evaluation, sometimes even to withhold our assent until we can properly decide, to either spend more time evaluating — checking in with head and heart. “Why don’t I wait a few minutes to see if I still feel like eating the donut?” “I’ll ask Sam whose donut it is.” “I feel like I’m avoiding something by eating this donut — I wonder what else I could do.” Giving and withholding our assent is our human superpower. It involves our full capacity to reason, which is both intellectual and emotional. And when we combine our intellectual and emotional reasoning as leaders we can be decision-makers and leaders with humanity.

We are definitely living a VUCA-life these days, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. We just can’t pause and reflect on every decision, although we can pause to reflect on many more than we do currently. And we need processes and models that help us cope, like Boyd’s OODA loop. But we also need models that will help us integrate the range of our reasoning capacities, to make fully human decisions. My donut example is kind of silly, but we can make it serious, deadly serious: I see a young African American man running on my street. I’m not including this to make light of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, or any one of countless acts of racially motivated violence. I’m using this example because for the Stoics there is no real difference, from a psychological point of view, between the decision process that leads to eating a donut or murdering a human being. It is all ethical, it all rests on the capacity of a human being to evaluate their perceptions, to regulate their actions intellectually and emotionally, with full humanity and a willingness to withhold assent when we can’t be sure. Obviously, we must at least start at the level of equal human worth, but the ideal Stoic, the Stoic Sage, makes every choice ethically. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it’s really, really hard.

If we cannot find way to engage with the complexity of our current reality individually and collectively, the increase in all the aspects of VUCA we face will crush us, body and soul. Systems like OODA work, of course. People wouldn’t use them if they didn’t. What I wonder is if they work fully enough to help us keep our humanity while the world is speeding up and growing more uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Do you want to be more stoic about life? Then be more human, learn also to reason through what emotions you are feeling and what emotions are relevant to the decisions you make. Livin’ la vida VUCA seems inevitable these days, but let’s live it like human beings.

Emotional Intelligence coaching may be one of the best investments leaders can make in themselves and their teams, especially when it comes to #diversityequityinclusion. EI development supports empathy, reduces unconscious bias, and improves our ability to value multiple perspectives. In the rush, especially in higher education and non-profits at the moment, to *survive* don’t neglect low cost, high return, choices to *sur-thrive*. Great short read here – and I’m always here to listen to what you need. 
#empathyinaction #diversitymatters #genderequity  #inclusionmatters #emotionalintelligence #unconsciousbias #improveyourself #nonprofitmanagement #highereducationleadership  #innercitadelconsulting #collegesanduniversities

A question popped into my mind today as I did my practice: “Can the ‘old’ leadership traits be repurposed?” The question might take some unpacking, but as I sat with it a bit, curious about where the thought came from, I realized the underlying concern. 1) The kinds of leadership qualities that lie behind the different kinds of responses to the COVID-19 crisis are connected to the incredibly complex machinery of human emotional, neurological, and social realities. 2) Those qualities in the right roles and contexts can drive positive change and growth. 3) Those qualities in the wrong roles and contexts, as has become increasingly apparent, can be deadly both literally and figuratively. Our world (in the West, at least) has now changed – how will leadership traits change?

Leadership traits theory is controversial and I’ve no interest in diving into that rabbit hole. The “great men” mentality of the 20th century can hopefully be trashed as soon as possible and I’d like to believe that leadership is more complex and locally determined than that. Even so, research is still showing that there are some essential truths: some traits are a pre-condition for leadership as it was understood; these traits are connected to our collective neurological/biological history. For example, Conrad (2020) shows that among young emerging leaders, after careful analysis and regression modeling, only extraversion, openness, and dominance predicted leader emergence. Welcome back “big man”; goodbye functioning groups. We need a new understanding, especially in highly complex institutions like Higher Education.

One likely lasting outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic, which will be reinforced when there’s a second wave or another virus, is the disruption and decentralization of work and workspaces (Johansen 2017 wins again). The need across all kinds of organizations at all levels for EI leadership will be acute. The solution can’t be to toss out the old leaders. First it’s a ridiculous solution, since these leaders, whose leadership traits and instincts may become less productive but are still valuable, are also the decision makers – they’re unlikely to throw themselves out the door. Nor should they because, second, knowledge of the business, relationships, and experience are the other keys to good leadership. But without addressing the leadership crisis in this moment, we are likely to lose momentum for change and lose our chance to be better. As soon as it is “safe” again, we may return to old habits … but in a changed world. What we need is for leaders to want to change, to be repurposed.

Here’s the hope in the situation: our brains are plastic and with time, focus, and consistency we can change quite a lot about the way we approach leading. Books like Leading Beyond the Ego and Leading Well From Within make excellent cases for the neurological basis of leadership transformation. Whatever your current leadership traits, you can enhance and develop the kinds of emotionally intelligent leadership traits we are all going to rely on and that we need to cultivate for the new work and life realities. 

Here are four things you can do to prepare yourself to work with a coach.

1) Reflect on *why* you want to change not *what* – invested people will find their motivation for change sooner and feel it more strongly.

2) Begin or increase a mindfulness practice. The science clearly shows that visualization, focus, and a “calmer” brain will promote and stabilize the new neural pathways you will develop.

3) Begin or refocus your daily journaling to reflect on “reactive” moments in the day, the times when you made a decision on “instinct”, snapped at a colleague, or connected with them (or when you wanted to but didn’t). Become more aware of your feelings, your responses to those feelings, and the moments when you chose to respond rather than react.  

4) Invest in yourself by choosing an executive coach who can support you (like International Coaching Federation certified coaches). Good Emotional Intelligence training holds up a mirror, but demands that we engage reason and discipline in order to see clearly – good coaching offers honesty, insight, inspiration to change, a plan to change, and accountability. You deserve both good coaching and good training.

“Virtue,” he said, “is not just a theoretical knowledge, but a practical one too, as is the case with both medical and musical knowledge. It is necessary, then, just as the doctor and the musician have not each learned only the theory of their discipline but also have been trained to act in accordance with the theory, that the man who is becoming good is also not only learning what lessons take him towards virtue but training in accordance with these lessons through focus and hard work.” (Musonius Rufus, On Practice)

There is an enormous difference between truly knowing the right action to take and taking the right action, and virtue for the Stoics consists of both happening at the same time. The Stoic exercitatio, or practice, seems to have been intended – like most forms of practice – to build up not only strength or capacity for the circumstances faced in human life but also a kind of ethical muscle memory that gets activated in those circumstances. Just as the best athletes, or musicians, or martial arts students learn movements to create specific response pathways to pertinent kinds of stimuli, so to does the moral practitioner “practice” movements of the mind-soul in response to external stimuli. And almost all of Stoic mindfulness practice involves drawing attention away from the unmindful response to the mindful response, away from the unaware reactions to an aware choice of action. This attitude towards the integration of “theory” and “practice” across all our choices and interactions will provoke a profound shift in perspective. For effective dialogue, for example, this means that we must consistently practice good dialogue strategies, such as active listening or mirroring, and that we could even practice it with ourselves. How often do we act without considering how we *really* feel in the moment or what outcome we *really* expect from our actions? A quick look back through email exchanges might leave you wondering …