Dear courageous leaders,

A client of mine is a few months into a new role. Her company was absorbed by a larger one, and most of her colleagues did not make the move. She did, and for the first few weeks she kept asking herself why.

She also arrived certain of something. Her new leader had been doing similar work inside the company for years, and my client was sure this woman saw her as a threat. She read it in meetings and in a facial expression. She had built a whole file in her head.

Then, in a one-on-one, her leader told her something she did not expect. She had advocated for my client's hiring. She was glad to have her on the team. A week later, she was coaching my client on how to describe her own territory so it would carry more weight with senior leadership.

When my client told me this, she laughed and said she had judged this woman completely wrong. Then she said something more interesting. She wondered whether the assumption had been a kind of protection.

I think she was right.

The Lens

I began my career in a classroom. Later I led from a literacy supervisor office, and eventually I sat at the table in the executive conference room as a deputy superintendent. Each move changed my view. From the cabinet table I could see trends no single classroom could show me, and I could hold more of the system at once. More of it competed for my attention, too. What I lost was daily proximity to the students we served. In the classroom, that insight arrived every morning without my asking. From the conference room, I had to go looking for it on purpose.

Every seat teaches us something, and we carry those lessons forward as knowledge. In a sense they are knowledge. They were true somewhere, often for an earlier version of ourselves. That is exactly what makes them persuasive.

Susan David has language for this. In Emotional Agility, she describes the common ways we get hooked, and one of them is old, outgrown ideas: beliefs that served us once and that we keep obeying long after the situation that created them has changed. In her framing, being hooked means a thought or story has stopped being something we notice and has become the lens we see through.

My client's certainty about her new leader had been learned somewhere earlier. What made it hard to see is that it came with commitments attached. If my new leader is a threat, then I am committed to staying guarded around her and to keeping my best thinking close until I know where I stand. Each of those moves makes sense if the story is true. Each of them also shapes the relationship. Guardedness tends to invite guardedness back, and an assumption can quietly produce the evidence it was waiting for.

At the retreat I co-led this month, a circle of women leaders spent real time with this. The hard part was never naming what they wanted to change. Everyone knew. The hard part was finding the quiet belief underneath that made the change feel unsafe. Most of those beliefs had some truth in them. They had been earned, and that is what kept them in charge.

There is a fair objection here. Some assumptions are accurate. Some new leaders really do see you as competition. Some workplaces really are unsafe, and the people who learned caution in them learned something true. Telling a seasoned leader to drop her guard and assume the best can be naive advice, and for leaders whose voices have historically cost them more, it can be costly advice.

Some of what we carry from earlier seats is also something better than an assumption. It is a value. The classroom taught me that students are human beings with emotions and hopes. A child struggling with a new concept while grieving the loss of a pet, or worrying about a parent who just lost a job, does not care about the pacing guide. I carried that knowing all the way to the cabinet table, where pacing guides were decisions touching thousands of students. They mattered there. They set direction and let us monitor progress. What changed was how we held them. We set an acceptable range and let go of rigidity, so that reading success could sit alongside the life lessons and character growth I had watched happen in classrooms for years.

David calls this bothness, the capacity to hold two true things at once. The view from the conference room and the view from the classroom were both true. Neither was complete without the other.

So the work is telling the difference. A value earned in an earlier seat deserves a place at the new table. An assumption earned there deserves a test. David treats thoughts and emotions as information to read rather than instructions to follow, and that is true of both. An assumption that holds up under a fair test is worth keeping. An assumption that has never been tested is running your leadership without your permission. That assumption creates and immunity.

My client did not decide overnight that her leader was trustworthy. She held the story a little more loosely, and when new evidence arrived, she let it in. That small loosening is where a real working relationship began.

Clear Eyes. Full Hearts Practices

Test one story.

Before your week begins, sit with these questions:

• What am I certain about in my current seat, about a person or about what the people I serve need?
• Where did I first learn it, and how long ago?
• Is it a value I want to carry forward, or an assumption that needs a test?
• What would I need to see to update it, and have I made it possible to see it?

Leadership translation: Choose one meeting this week where your story will be in play. Before you walk in, write the story down in one sentence. During the meeting, watch for one piece of evidence that does not fit it. You don't have to change your mind. You only have to let the story be tested.

Invitation

If you are carrying a story into a new seat right now, you don't have to test it alone. Let's find our time together. It's a conversation to get to know each other and see whether working together would help. Schedule 45-minutes today.

​Find our time together!

​
​Clear eyes. Full hearts.​
​Paula

Inspired by Susan David, PhD, and her work on action, motivation, and meaningful change in Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life.

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