From my early days as a therapist and now as an author and leadership expert, I have helped people discover the power and happiness that comes with the mindset of responsibility. And counterintuitively, to teach this mindset, I first teach its opposite:learned helplessness. Why? When people believe they can't impact their circumstances, it stops them from leaping into the power they already have to create happiness and success.
Related: Stop making excuses for who and where you are
Take me and my desire to lose weight, for example. After a few months of seemingly doing everything I could to move the numbers on the scale, I was seeing little results. In fact, I started believing wholeheartedly that I had a thyroid problem. When I went to see my doctor, he did a series of tests and told me the good news:my thyroid was completely healthy, a little overactive in fact! He was thrilled, I was devastated. You see, the reality is that I had told myself a story, believing that I had done everything I could to lose weight. In fact, as my doctor helped me accurately account for my habits, I realized that I was only making half-hearted attempts. I regularly dieted from morning to afternoon. After 3 p.m., however, I was no longer as responsible for my goal, but sought to attribute it to a medical issue. Many of us live our lives the same way. We cite external reasons why we cannot succeed and believe our own stories that our half-hearted attempts to achieve results were real.
Learned helplessness causes us to fall into the belief that external circumstances prevent us from succeeding , that everyone or everything else is at fault, and more importantly, that there is no way to overcome it. This aligns with your team's commitment because if they see their situation through their ego, they can't see how they can make an impact.
I'm not talking about healthy self-confidence. I'm talking about the ego working like a pair of glasses with the wrong prescription. It skews reality and causes our teams to deviate from the real facts of a situation, assigning motive, making assumptions and crushing reality with a mental story. It drops us into the victim role, giving someone or something else all the power. Over time, this habit of thinking calcifies into a set of helpless, helpless behaviors, in which people hold themselves back more effectively than any external circumstance or person ever could. When people believe they are not having an impact, they disengage.
Learned helplessness is symbolized by battle fatigue, that moment when we encounter yet another obstacle and believe, This problem never goes away and we really can't do anything about it. We just have to learn to live with it. Humans may not be rational, but they are predictable. People will take a limitation from the external environment, internalize it, exaggerate it, and reinforce it in their imagination until they have chained themselves to it. They tell themselves a story about what is possible and impossible, and that story dictates their efforts.
Step into the power you already have
For quite some time, the conventional wisdom of leadership has been that we must listen to complaints from disgruntled employees, that leaders should strive to provide employees with optimal working conditions so that they feel empowered and engaged. Conventional wisdom has led leaders to cultivate an empowered, not accountable workforce, which actually leads to engagement.
If you encourage people to cite their circumstances as the reasons why they cannot succeed and make excuses for their lack of results, you encourage learned helplessness and the victim mentality that comes with it. You allow people to believe, in essence, "We can't do our best under suboptimal circumstances, and we're not 100% personally responsible for our results." In the reality of day-to-day work, our teams will operate with a less-than-perfect plan, imperfect clients, and less-than-desired resources. Our role as leaders is to help them access the power they already have, which uses their skills, talents, and abilities to bridge the gap between reality and perfect circumstances.
Questions for stimulate self-reflection
If someone comes to you in a state of learned helplessness, seeing only lack and impossibility, the best action you can take is to interrupt their thought and help him get to the bottom of the "story". It is the role of the modern leader to guide a new mindset – that the stories we tell ourselves are the sources of most of our suffering, and any stressful thoughts we have are most likely wrong.
Here are two good questions you can ask to bring your team back to reality:
1. What do we know for sure?
The first question to overcome a helpless mindset is, “What do we know for sure?” Listen to the facts. Repeat the facts you've heard and ask if that's roughly what you know for sure. Then ask a quick follow-up question to inspire action:“What can you do to help?”
2. What would he look like?
One of my favorite questions to stop getting in his ways is, "What would look best right now (for the client, your team, your project)?" This shifts the shift from thinking as a victim to generating an empowering and responsible action plan. People can usually answer this question because everyone knows what great looks like; it is the basis on which we judge others. For example, when your morning coffee line doesn't move fast enough to keep it running on time, we can always describe what a big one would look like (i.e., they need more help, more registries, a better process, etc.) Your people know and can describe to you what a super looks like, and so I say, “Great. Now go well.
These questions work because they help us get past the asymmetrical filter of our ego and stimulate self-reflection. And self-reflection is the foundation of personal responsibility. As leaders, we can eradicate learned helplessness by waking up those who have fallen asleep to the ego story that they are helpless and cannot have any impact. Instead of seeking to correct and perfect your team's circumstances, transform their mindsets to live skillfully in any reality. Imagine the power of your team when they develop the skills to succeed despite all the circumstances that come your way. What a powerful way to immediately turn excuses into results.
Related: If you want to change your results, you must first change your thinking
