disapproval. And I’m okay with that. I have two healthy children who love me, and I have no knowledge of the pain associated with natural childbirth. I’ll accept others’ judgment for my ignorance any day. These are consequences I’m willing to accept.
But in leadership, we don’t get to cop out so easily. Or if we do, we suffer bigger consequences with larger impact. In leadership, we are responsible for the collective good we represent. When we don’t address a problem, we create a dynamic that touches all parts of the system – like a pebble that causes ripples through water. As leaders, our actions do not just affect us alone – ever. Others are watching what we do and listening to what we say, their goal being to observe and determine how we will lead when faced with tough times. Even though our pain tolerances – or thresholds – may differ, with what seems routine for one feeling like walking over hot coals to another, as leaders, we are all held to the same standard. Leaders are expected to be courageous.
Here is the good news. Although courage is not easy, it is accessible to everyone. Here is the not-so-good news. The way to embrace courage is to embrace pain. It’s not that courageous leaders derive pleasure from pain but that they are willing to accept pain as part of the process.
Although our threshold for pain is different, we are likely to have a common reaction to it. Let me illustrate this by sharing a story you can likely relate to. After an incredibly long travel day, I finally landed at my home airport and shuffled my way through the crowds to the walkway to the parking garage. As I stepped off the curb and onto the street, pulling my bag behind me, a large bus was barreling toward me. Without a single thought, I instinctively jumped back onto the curb. It took about 30 seconds before I could process what had just happened. It occurred to me afterward that whatever drew me back to safety was not me but something instinctual inside me that sensed danger before my sleepy head could acknowledge it. And that’s exactly what happened.
We Feel (We Experience Fear, Discomfort, or Pain)
There is a part of our brain that knows instinctively when danger is imminent. It is called the amygdala. According to the Institute for Health and Human Performance, the amygdala’s job is to perceive and respond to threats. It answers the primal question of “Do I eat it or does it eat me?”9 The amygdala responds to a threat in milliseconds, before the part of our brain that processes information for reasoning, the neocortex, can respond. This explains why, if you’ve ever been in a near death situation, you likely found yourself responding before you really understood the rationale behind your response. Your fight, flight, or freeze response took over so that it could be driving your brain rather than the part of your brain that needs to intellectually process information.10
Consider the options if my neocortex had engaged in a series of questions to assess my options while confronted with the bus:
Option 1 – leave the bag on the curb and run across the street to beat the bus.
Option 2 – take your bag with you back to the curb.
Option 3…by this time, I’m dead.
The amygdala helps ensure our safety by providing us an immediate reaction that shows up as fear, discomfort, or pain. This is how we know that there is a threat. These emotions are our early warning signs shouting, “Warning! Warning! You are entering dangerous territory!” Now, the problem is that not everything the amygdala perceives as a threat is real. At the airport walkway, the amygdala saved me from being hit by a bus, but in the conference room during a meeting (even though it feels like we are getting run over), the threat in the room is likely a differing opinion, not a bus. For many of us, our body will respond to the fear, discomfort, or pain in the meeting room as if it were warning us of a real physical threat. And we’ll move to fight, flee, or freeze, regardless.11
We Think (We Process It Intellectually)
Once we feel pain, we move to engaging our neocortex, which then has time to think about what just happened. This part of the process is completely objective. Our brains are processing information about what occurred. In my scenario, once safe, I could acknowledge that I stepped out in front of a bus and stepped back with my bag before it could hit me. I then acknowledged that I was tired and not paying attention to where I was going as the probable cause of why I ended up in the situation. Back in the meeting room where we feel run over by a bus – our colleague who represents a threat – we can now intellectualize what has just occurred. This is when we collect data based on what we can see or hear.12 Likely we might collect data that looks something like this:
• I asked for support from Robby before the meeting, and he agreed to go into this meeting aligned.
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