It didn’t come out as anxiety, however.  As fear so often does, it came out as anger.  The group made up story after story about how this reorg was going to go badly and result in unfair treatment.  They would be asked to do things outside of their ability; they would have to report to two supervisors and be pulled between them; they would be appraised on work that they didn’t know how to do.  The stories went on and on, and even a tour through the concepts of the ladder of inference and our very human tendency to make up stories that are worse than reality didn’t seem to help.

I got back to my hotel room after the second day and found a blog entry on my email from Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Blog that I wished I’d seen that morning.  It was a guest post from an author named Chip Conley, who has a new book out called Emotional Equations.   In describing ways to become a CEO (Chief Emotional Officer), Conley lays out a number of mathematical equations to increase our self-awareness of our own emotional responses.  There were too many interesting concepts in the post to mention all of them, but one that really struck me was the equation “Anxiety = Uncertainty x Powerlessness.”  How true!  And Conley suggested a simple activity that I wished I’d had the opportunity to facilitate with my group earlier that day:

“If we know that the combustible product of uncertainty and powerlessness creates anxiety, we can create what I call an Anxiety Balance Sheet to turn this around. Take out a piece of paper and create four columns. Then, think of something that is currently making you anxious. Regarding that subject, the first column is “What Do I Know” about this issue. The second column is “What Don’t I Know.” The third column is “What Can I Influence.” The fourth column is “What Can’t I Influence.” Spend enough time doing this so that you have at least one item per column but you may find that you have a half-dozen items in some columns.”

The result, Conley says, is that we will discover more items in columns one and three than in two and four.  And with a little thought and consultation with our resources, we might move some things from the “bad” columns to the “good” columns.  I believe if I’d facilitated an activity like this with my anxious team building group, we might have come out with an action plan for asking questions of leadership and taking a more active role in shaping the reorg in a positive direction.

I’ve ordered Conley’s book, so stay tuned for more interesting emotional equations!

It isn’t just the intrusion of constant calls that gets annoying though; more and more every year, it’s the finger-pointing and lack of accountability that pervades the dialogue of every campaign ad and debate.  Jeffrey Saltzman had an interesting blog post recently in which he laments what appears to be a very pervasive case of the fundamental attribution error in politics (my characterization, not his, but I think he would agree with my use of the term).   There is a human tendency to see our own actions as motivated by external circumstances, but the actions of others as motivated by bad intentions.  Saltzman lists examples both domestic and international, including Anthony Weiner claiming that someone else hacked his Twitter account and circulated pornographic pictures of him; Herman Cain blaming a conspiracy for the claims of a woman who said she had an affair with him; and a entire host of Arab leaders who blamed terrorists rather than the terrible conditions they themselves had created for the people’s attempts to overthrow their regimes.  I would add my own example of Ron Paul claiming to be completely unaware and therefore not responsible for racist remarks in newsletters put out in his name.  And of course, there are countless other examples across the spectrum of politicians, on both sides of the partisan divide.

We see it in the corporate world too.  A organizational leader gets caught out for bad behavior and immediately looks to external factors to explain it.  It was government regulation or incompetence; it was a corrupt employee that no one was aware of; it was the lies and entrapment of a competitor.  Think of the Wall Street bank industry’s executive compensation after bailouts, the News Corp phone hacking scandal, and the endless accounting scandals that get reported every year. Rarely does anyone just step up and say, “I screwed up.  I’m sorry.”

Saltzman says, “While of course not new, the number of times that the excuse of external forces being  at play as the rationale for dismissing accusations, crimes, violence, murder, the taking away of rights, and in general bad behavior seems to me to be more plentiful now than it has ever been. I have to think that some of the leaders dismissing these activities are simply looking for a convenient excuse for their actions and are knowingly lying, but that others may be truly incapable of seeing the world accurately, always seeing sinister forces of some sort working against them or external forces controlling them. I am not sure which is worse.”

I’m not sure either, but I wish Ron Paul would call in person so I could give him a piece of my mind.

Once we made the decision, a great tradition was born.  Every year at Christmas we would go somewhere and eat Chinese food and watch a movie, or sometimes go skiing.  One year we spent the holidays in Austin, Texas, where I was living at the time, and went out to see the premier of Pulp Fiction.  Another year we went to Portland, Maine where my brother was living and ate sushi and stayed out late.

In more recent years the tradition has faltered because I was teaching skiing in Colorado and always had to work over the holidays.  But now I’m back home with the family, so this year we’ll do the dinner-and-a-movie thing again.  I’ve been watching my friends frantically buying and wrapping presents and decorating their homes and baking cookies, and while some of them are certainly having fun some of the time, most of them seem to be having no fun most of the time.  They look just as harried and over-worked as they were in their offices before they went out for their holiday vacations.  They looked forward to a break and then they saddled themselves with even more responsibilities than they had before the vacation.

Meanwhile, I’ve been having a relaxing week, catching up on work projects in the mornings and hiking with my dog in the afternoons.  I plan to do the same all through next week.  When everyone returns to their offices on January 3rd and pulls their hair out over how much catching up they have to do (and how tired they are from the vacation to-do lists), I’ll be feeling ahead of the game and well-rested.

I’m not saying it could work for everyone.  If you have kids, you probably gotta do the holidays.  If you’re a devout Christian or Jew you may feel strongly about maintaining some holiday rituals.   But sometimes we think we have to celebrate things in traditional ways just because it’s the done thing.  What the holidays really mean to me is spending time with my family.  That doesn’t have to include the trappings of Christmas commercialism, does it?

Many people have already reviewed this great book, but for reasons different than my own.  The focus is usually on Don Mann’s experience in Seal Team Six, and in special ops in the Middle East since his retirement; and rightfully so.  This is not only where mainstream interest lies, but where Don’s greatest contribution to American society lies as well.

My reaction to the book was very personal, however.  I’ve known Don for about ten years.  I’ve always referred to him as my “adventure racing mentor,” because when I first got into the sport I attended his six-day adventure racing academy in Virginia.  I came home from that week completely jazzed about the sport, and I don’t believe it was solely because of the attractions of the sport itself (although I must confess that the idea of traveling through the wilderness, for days on end, in co-ed teams that must survive through team work, strategy and sheer toughness was always very appealing to me).   But it was also because of Don’s presentation.  He conveys passion in a quiet, mild-mannered way; he has seemingly endless reserves of physical endurance but also of sensitivity; he is the paragon of toughness, but also of patience and kindness.  I remember during the registration for my first race, the difficult two-day Endorphin Fix, a swarm of racers thronged the site and Don must have had a million things to take care of.  I told him I was having trouble packing my backpack and he made me feel as if he had absolutely nothing else to do at that moment but give me a lesson in gear organization.  That’s how he is.

I laughed and cried throughout the book.   My own childhood was also fraught with what Don calls, in the early pages of the book, “a craving for danger, action and adventure.”  And like Don, I found it in all the wrong places initially; things that could have gotten me killed or arrested.  Don says, “I was a bat-out-of-hell, shit-kicker motorcycle punk” and describes scenes of New England biker bars, hair-raising cop chases, drugs and violence.

But eventually he learns to channel all the fire into something truly useful.  And there’s a lesson for all of us in his life story.  “Most people have no idea of what their full potential is,” he says memorably.   “One of my mottoes is Blood from Any Orifice.  Because I figure that if you don’t push beyond what you think your limits are, you’ll never know your true abilities.”

Could anything ring any truer?  And I realize that even as a corporate dropout, world traveler, expedition-length adventure racer and volunteer mountain rescuer, I never managed to push my limits the way Don did.  Few of us have, in fact.

There were stories throughout the book that I’d heard Don tell before, or heard through the adventure-racing grapevine, but never been able to place in such a meaningful context before.  Stories about having toenails removed, or passing out from over-exertion after a workout; but also really painful events like when Dawn Mann’s son was shot while Don and Dawn were in the middle of running a Beast of the East race.  There was Mark Burnett’s ruinous railroad operation on Don’s first major race plans, for a Beast in Alaska.  And Don selling his Harley and mortgaging his house to finance Odyssey Adventure Racing.  I realize now that most of these things happened while Don continued to serve his country in overseas operations that he couldn’t talk about.  We were already impressed with Don’s amazing “fire in the belly” and we didn’t even know the half of it!

But my favorite story is one that I’m quite sure I never heard before reading the book.  While competing in his first Raid Gauloise, Don says he hallucinated a beautiful Chinese girl in the river on the paddling section of the race.  Funny.  Because during Primal Quest Utah, the toughest race I ever did and one that Don put on, I hallucinated an Asian woman kneeling on the front of my kayak during the paddling section, and kept telling my teammates we had to pull over because of it.

My friends in adventure who know Don Mann, if you haven’t already read this book, now you see that you must.  But for anyone else this book is a must-read too.  Read it for insight into the elite team of Seals that took out Bin Laden; read it for the great lessons it can teach our youth who don’t know what to do with their potentially destructive energy; or read it for the inspiring co-existence of a action-hero tough guy and a truly great humanitarian who is not afraid to express compassion and love.  Just as long as you read it.

What ensued was a long ordeal that could have been pretty painful if it weren’t for the very nice hunter that rescued me.

What’s funny about this is that I spent seven years as a volunteer rescuer for a search & rescue team, including a two-year stint as the public information officer in charge of our efforts to educate the public on wilderness recreation safety.   And yet yesterday I did everything I’ve always warned people not to do.  I didn’t tell anyone where I was going; I left with no pack, thus no map, compass, GPS or survival gear; and I only left myself about five hours before dark, even though I knew the hike could take the full five hours (as it turns out it would have been more like seven if I’d made it all the way around).  The temperature was in the mid-30s and I had no extra clothing or anything to make a fire with, nor did I have a headlamp.  And the area I was in was completely deserted; I didn’t see a soul all day except for the hunter who finally rescued me.

I ran into the hunter just about the time I realized I had gone wrong somehow.  I thought I’d crossed the bridge that was out, but I was mistaken.  I was now on the West Loop trail heading north, but I thought I was on the West Side trail heading south.  I was going further away from my car, which was parked at the Somerset dam, and it was 3:30, a mere hour from dusk.  The hunter, Greg, stopped to chat with me as he headed in the opposite direction to meet his uncle for a pre-dusk hour of deer hunting.  When I told him where I was trying to go, he scratched his head and looked a little worried.

“You’re an awfully long way from the dam,” he said.  “And you’re going the wrong way.”

“So how do I go back to the dam on the West Side trail?” I asked.

“You can’t really do that without swimming, you have to cross some water,” Greg replied.  “You’ve gotta turn back and go the way you came.”

I looked at my watch.  That would mean at least two hours of travel after dark.  Not a great idea, especially given all the river crossings and rocky terrain.  If I’d had a headlamp it would have been viable, but without one it was pretty hazardous.  As I stewed about my options Greg suggested that I hike out to his truck and wait there for him.  He’d get me to somewhere there was cell phone reception.

Defeated, I hiked out to a dirt road where Greg’s truck was parked.  There was a shelter there, with a small area map on the wall, and I studied it in vain.  I had no idea where I was.  I sat down next to the truck to wait.  My dog, Jave, stared at me in confusion, trying to figure out why we would stop in the middle of a hike and sit on the cold ground.

By the time Greg showed up at 5:00, Jave and I were both shivering.  Greg’s cousin Spike arrived a few minutes later and we drove to their hunting camp, a luxurious cabin (by hunting camp standards) with running water and electricity.  There was still no cell phone reception, and the hunters thought my plan to call my brother was silly anyway; he would have a very long drive to get to me, never mind to get me back to my car.  Despite the fact that it would mean an hour drive each way for him, Greg offered to take me back to my car himself.  He even refused the gas money I tried to give him.

The kindness of strangers is a subject I’ve always meditated heavily on when I’ve run across it.  Something about it always brings tears to my eyes.  I’d like to think I deserved this kindness for all the years I volunteered on my rescue team, helping hunters, hikers, skiers and snowmobilers who’d made mistakes.  But I also know that I’m one of the people who has no excuse whatsoever for making those kinds of mistakes in the first place.

And Jave agrees, given that he had to wait three hours to get his damn dinner.

I was thinking recently about how to convince stoic employees of this point–employees who believe that emotions have no place in the office.  Here’s a good story: a few years ago, my brother and I were struggling to hold on to a piece of commercial real estate that was no longer cash flowing enough to pay the mortgage.  We’d been forced into a management contract with a company we didn’t want to work with, and we felt they were taking advantage of us and had failed to go the extra mile in getting the property leased up.  It was a situation that had gone on for many years, and we were frustrated and angry, especially with the owner of the management company.

After about a year of negotiating with the bank and looking at various options, it came down to this:

1. We could lose the property to the bank; or

2. We could accept a deal from the management company owner, a man we’d come to think of as an evil manipulator, a deal that would make us more beholden to him and would prolong the management contract–and thus the unwanted relationship– indefinitely.

We chose to lose the property.

Not convinced yet that the people issues must be dealt with first?  Then here’s one more detail: We lost 1.2 million dollars on that deal.  And we still don’t regret our decision.

He says the same applies to our current political situation.  A politician perceived to be moving things in the right direction will get elected or re-elected even if the status quo is terrible.

The message then, obviously, is that complacency is death.  It doesn’t matter how well you’ve been doing; if you stop setting high standards and moving toward them, public or consumer perception of your effectiveness will decrease.  This is a message I’ve been delivering to teams for years.  So you think you’re a high performing team?  You’ve got it all figured out?  What are you doing to keep it that way?  If the answer is “nothing,” you’re not likely to stay on top of your game for very long.

Does this make it sound like we’re all on a hamster wheel, running to nowhere and never able to stop?  Saltzman says the reason we value improvement so much is that themes like movement, change and renewal get our attention, and his research shows that these tendencies cross cultural borders and seem to be universally human.  That’s an observation that makes it more palatable to me.  It also reinforces another thing I’ve told teams for years: It’s not true that people hate and fear change.  We simply hate and fear change that we perceive to be moving us in the direction of loss rather than gain.  If you can effectively make the case for change moving us in a positive direction, people will buy in.  In fact, they may even be enthusiastic about it.

They didn’t seem to agree.  But finally someone clarified the dilemma and the group agreed: We’ve lost sight of our mission, he said.  We’re not doing what we exist to do anymore.  We’re just reacting to the push and pull of an unhappy public and politicians under pressure to espouse inflexible party lines.

I had told them earlier about my recent experience with the hoarded white board markers and door stops.  I meant it as comic relief but they didn’t even crack a smile.  It’s simply their reality right now, and there’s nothing funny about it.

There’s nothing funny about our government agencies losing sight of their mission, either.  I’ve seen private sector organizations lose their mission and it’s hard to get it back.  Employees lose their passion for the work.  Managers lose their perspective about how to lead effectively.  Everyone bounces from crisis to crisis and it’s hard to remember why we’re here except that we need a paycheck.  Nothing good can come of this.  We need to quit bashing the government and figure out how to restore it to its mission, and that requires having intelligent dialogue rather than mouthing mindless partisan cliches.

I promised to guard the markers with my life, and then asked about a door stop for the meeting room’s heavy hallway door.  She pulled a rubber door stop out of her pocket and admitted that she was forced to hoard those too.

The atmosphere in the public sector is tense right now, and it’s not just about door stops and markers.  It’s about jobs.  When we talk about cutting back government and focusing on job growth in the private sector, I think we often miss the point that cutting back government is about putting more people out of work.  And as a former human resource director from the private sector, I disagree that the private sector stimulates job growth better than the government.  Private sector jobs may pay better overall, but especially with small, start-up companies they are often jobs with rotten or no benefits packages and a very uncertain future.  Government jobs typically are stable, pay competitively, offer solid training and development opportunities, and have great benefits packages.

Newsweek columnist Paul Begala had an article a few weeks ago called I {heart} government: Why now is the time to defend big government , in which he laments the ludicrous nature of Rick Perry cutting funding for volunteer firefighters while wildfires rage throughout the state of Texas.

We don’t do it anymore.  Pam said something a few years ago about how we never accomplished all our goals and maybe there were too many of them.  Is that why we quit doing it?  I can’t remember.

We had a moment of energy this weekend when Pam said, “If I have a goal this year, it has to have something to do with finding a new passion.  Something new to be truly engaged with.”  And that’s what I’ve been thinking too; it’s what I was talking about when I wrote Single white female seeking a new tribe recently.  Pam reminded me that it doesn’t start with finding the tribe; it starts with finding the thing the tribe is passionate about, and making it your passion.  Then the tribe grows around the engagement in whatever that thing is.

So Pam threw out an idea she was thinking about, to explore the world of yoga at a retreat in western Massachusetts she’d been looking at.  I had been thinking, similarly, about going to a fit woman retreat in Vermont.  I think the thing we’re both looking for is a place to network with other women and get inspired by new ideas.  Our friend Claudia was with us and she was interested too, so we looked at Pam’s yoga retreat and we looked at my fitness retreat and the bottom line is that we couldn’t find a weekend or a week that would work for all of us to go.

That’s the trouble with finding a new thing to be passionate about.  If you’re not really passionate about anything yet, but you’re just looking to try new things, you end up not putting in the necessary effort to make it happen, to make it fit in a busy schedule.

Maybe we’ll try again next year.