Complete Leadership - Reconciling Dual Priorities

The greatest impediment to peak performance comes from
comfort priorities (pleasure that beckons; discomfort that repels)
that imperceptibly interfere with our success priorities.

As we continue the drive toward a systematic process to improve success, we will occasionally identify existing but inadequate insights into the automatic side of human nature and raise them to a new level of usefulness.

Beyond "soft" success factors: The business community's insights into "soft" success factors are helpful but anemic. Identifying the five ways the auto-self affects success provides a much greater ability to understand automatic activities as a basis to improve performance systematically as a key to sustaining success.

Beyond "subconscious": Psychology's insight into the "subconscious" aspects of the mind is helpful but represents just one of the 15 properties we have identified for the auto-self, and it is not the most important property for improving success.

Beyond "comfort zone": We will now provide the same improvement for the helpful but insufficient insight into the "comfort zone." Mental Property #12 creates our dual priorities. The auto-self controls actions through feelings (pleasure and discomfort). The thinking-self controls actions through intentional thoughts (strategies, goals, plans, tasks…). Thus, the thinking-self and the auto-self motivate action through two distinct mechanisms. Once we thoroughly understand this, we can harmonize those mechanisms to improve success and make succeeding more enjoyable.

The key to managing our success is to notice the alignment or lack thereof of the two distinct mechanisms that drive our actions and thoughts. Managing our dual priorities creates a major opportunity to create consistent performance toward sustained success.

Our thinking-self establishes our success priorities because knowledge underpins this pathway to action. To succeed, we must learn a great deal about our field. Professional people normally spend many years learning the information and processes associated with their field. We describe the knowledge they acquire by their level and type of education, such as a master's degree in accounting. People use their knowledge to plan how to accomplish such activities as designing, manufacturing, marketing, and measuring financial results. They translate broad knowledge into results through strategies, goals, plans, and task lists. It seems straightforward. Smart people acquire knowledge, create actionable plans, and then execute their success agenda. This scenario often works. Unfortunately, as we know, this playbook doesn't always progress so smoothly.

We have a second, independent driving force that competes for control of our actions and thought patterns – our comfort priorities, which relentlessly repel us from accomplishing uncomfortable tasks no matter how important they are to our success. Comfort priorities also seductively beckon us to devote time and energy to pleasurable activities that may have nothing to do with achieving success or may actually undermine our success. Our robot-like comfort priorities operate independently from our success priorities because our auto-self controls our comfort priorities.

Dual priorities play a determinative role in attaining and sustaining success. When our comfort priorities align with our success priorities, successes normally result because we take pleasure and comfort from the conditions, choices, and actions that result in success.

When our comfort priorities compete with our success priorities, failure looms. When focusing on our success priorities, we must remain ever vigilant of our “robot within” that may be driving comfort priorities that pull us in an opposing direction that undermines achieving our success needs. A major goal of auto-behavior transformations and auto-context reconstructions is to transform dueling priorities into cooperating priorities.

Bruce was the CFO of $100 million West Coast industrial manufacturing company. One of the major findings of Bruce's leadership performance survey was that he relied too much on his own technical excellence and did not develop his team sufficiently. Although his company mandated annual performance reviews, Bruce avoided them, or when pressured, provided superficial reviews. I inquired about the feedback he had given to members of his team and his satisfaction with their overall performance. Bruce responded, "I prefer the indirect way to improve their performance rather than devastating them by ramming their deficiencies down their throats. I sent them to technical and leadership training seminars, but although I have seen improvements, some of them still are not performing at the level I need." Bruce misunderstood why he wasn't giving adequate performance reviews. Fortunately, Bruce decided to engage a coach for other issues, and during his coaching activities he soon recognized how he had been fooling himself about why he did not provide candid performance reviews. Here's how Bruce embarrassingly described his new insight, "I thought I was protecting my employees. Actually, I was depriving them of the frank, constructive feedback they needed to overcome their deficiencies and create new proficiencies. I finally understood that my own discomfort at providing corrective feedback blocked my needed actions. I thought I was giving real reasons when I claimed I was protecting them. I now understand I was just rationalizing by giving feeble excuses because I couldn't overcome my own discomfort."

Bruce leveraged this experience to gain insights into other automatic activities that were hampering his own performance and lowering the level of execution of his team. He described his new abilities: "It scares me to discover at this stage of my career how much of my success has been accidental. Some of my involuntary activities, including my assertiveness and energy, served me well, but others, such as my inability to make unpopular decisions or to resolve conflicts quickly, were increasingly lowering my effectiveness. Now that I understand this automatic mode of activities, I take actions to improve my own auto-self characteristics and the characteristics of members of my team. I now have much higher confidence that I have control of the levers of success for myself and my organization."

Sometimes, satisfying a comfort priority is the explicit goal, such as when we relax or partake of entertainment. Besides selecting a field for which they exhibit talent, most people try to enter a profession where they enjoy the main activities, such as extroverts going into sales and people who prefer solitary detailed work going into such fields as engineering or accounting. Even when we select a profession that we enjoy, demands for action inevitably arise that create discomfort, which sometimes blocks us from executing these needed actions. In addition to performance reviews, other activities where comfort priorities routinely undermine success priorities no matter how much we enjoy the field and the job type we select include public speaking, conflict resolution, self-discovery, changing an auto-behavior, and reconstructing an auto-context.

We experience internal reality wars when we unavoidably encounter two forces pulling us in different directions. My road rage story that I described on the Home page provides a graphic example. I had my thinking-self-based success priority that I was not going to engage in road rage. I also had my auto-self-based comfort priority that was forcing me to teach those rude drivers a lesson. I experienced a traumatic reality war between these two internal driving forces. When we try to change a habit or auto-context, we usually experience painful private reality wars. Try to re-experience what it felt like if you ever tried to quit smoking, avoid indulgent eating, or exercise regularly to improve your health. You no doubt experienced reality wars between your success priorities as embodied in your intention to change and your comfort priorities associated with overeating, smoking, or sedentary behavior. Have you ever to stop an annoying habit using a New Year’s Resolution or a promise at home or at work? If so, I suspect you can re-experience the personal reality wars you faced, whether you succeeded or not, so you can understand this internal upheaval better.

Besides the reality wars associated with intentions to change behaviors and internal drives to preserve the old habits, we have thought-based internal reality wars. A mild form occurs when two experts provide contradictory assertions, as is common with competing "expert" witnesses in trials. Much more disturbing internal reality wars occur when the outside world imposes information on us that differs from a belief or fundamental assumption embedded in an auto-context. A devastating problem arises when our thinking-self discovers information that contradicts an auto-self belief, such as disconfirming information about our self-image, the death of a loved one, or the looming failure of a business model.

The seminal work referred to here as "internal reality wars" appeared in the 1957 book by Leon Festinger, Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.

Our environment, our goals, and our values create our success needs. Sometimes our comfort priorities do not create strong feelings, so we can blast through them when they oppose our success agenda. However, many times our comfort priorities create a compelling driving force that we must deal with immediately. We refer to this relentless force, which is embedded in our auto-self, as the Comfort Imperative. The Comfort Imperative repels and compels us whether we like it or not.Our thinking-self cannot overpower the Comfort Imperative by sheer force of will. Instead, we must create other feelings that counteract the effects of the Comfort Imperative to achieve our success goals. The Comfort Imperative creates a merciless driving force that people ignore or reject to their unfortunate peril.

A leader once sternly told me, "I do not have feelings." This person was very intense, totally driven to succeed, obnoxiously rude to people he did not think executed effectively, and passionately resistant to acknowledging his strong feelings. Some leaders, particularly those in manufacturing, quality assurance, and accounting, claim feelings have no relevancy to business. In their opinion, business must run only by the numbers. These people mistakenly believe they can decide the impact feelings have on business success. They can deny they have feelings or claim that feelings don't affect business success, but that does not change human nature and eliminate the Comfort Imperative and its effects. Their opinions cannot change the fact that avoiding discomfort blocks some needed actions and that seeking pleasure often creates counterproductive behaviors. The only control people can exert over feelings in organizational life is to understand their impact and deal with them. Let's see if you can embrace the concept – try to say the dreaded four-letter "f" word without grimacing – "FEEL."

Life sometimes imposes difficulties on us. To handle the discomfort emanating from setbacks, we have several mechanisms that we can use to cope with bad breaks or personal failures. A friend of mine displayed this mechanism when he lost his job. He told me he wasn't happy in the job anyway and this was probably a good time to move on to find something better. He had just suffered a setback that he could not reverse. Telling himself a rationalization story was beneficial. It helped him cope with the serious discomfort of losing his job. However, the same coping mechanism backfires when we use it to rationalize why we are not taking actions that determine our success.

We unconsciously and tenaciously strive to escape internal reality wars. Sometimes these private reality wars signal us that we need to change a behavior or reconstruct a context to align with our success needs. However, these auto-self transformations inherently create discomfort, so we often use mental tricks to resolve the internal reality wars and inadvertently abandon our success priorities because we fail to make needed changes.

It is difficult to overstate the impact of misaligned priorities on personal achievement. Internal comfort drives force us to seek pleasure and to avoid discomfort. The Comfort Imperative operates insidiously because we don't normally notice the process, and we have clever ways of evading the discomfort without noticing the consequences.

Although the Comfort Imperative often causes our failures, it also should prevent us from allowing ourselves to fail. That is, if we understood we were making a poor choice based on unnecessary or harmful actions we take or needed actions we fail to take, then discomfort should force us to take more-constructive actions. How then do we avoid noticing when our comfort priorities drive us into activities that are contrary to our success needs? To evade discomfort, we use clever, but often dysfunctional, gimmicks (mental tricks) to avoid noticing when we fail to take needed actions or we display undesired behaviors. These evasion gimmicks work because we avoid noticing them. When we inadvertently use evasion gimmicks, we unfortunately engage in self-sabotage. Evasion gimmicks backfire on us. We avoid short-term discomfort, but often at the expense of achieving or sustaining success. Evasion gimmicks (misused coping mechanisms) that people commonly employ include:

With this evasion gimmick, people tell themselves that the task was not important so it is all right to skip it. Unfortunately, they often use rationalizations counterproductively to escape an internal reality war caused by knowing they are failing to take an action needed for their success.

People acknowledge that they need to execute a task by placing it on a "to do" list but keep comfortably avoiding doing it by never assigning it a high enough priority to require immediate action. Instead, they work on other activities that have a lower priority for success but that feel more comfortable. Another common way to avoid noticing this mode of failure is to keep so busy that you tell yourself and others you are just "too busy" to get to it.

This evasion gimmick allows people to avoid the discomfort that should accompany not taking needed actions by getting lost instead in some activity that they enjoy. Common examples of escape rituals are idle conversations, surfing the Web, playing computer games, fantasizing, watching TV programs, and reading for pleasure. These activities are not intrinsically bad. Actually, they may be a significant part of what a person does for enjoyment or relaxation. The problem arises when people do these things instead of the activities needed to enact their intentions to execute their success agenda.

This "seduction trap" mechanism enables people to satisfy their comfort priorities without effectively satisfying their success priorities. When they realize they are failing, they negotiate a truce for their internal reality war by executing apparently-useful activities that minimize immediate discomfort at the expense of fulfilling real, but uncomfortable, success needs. This seductive mechanism creates two counterproductive "feelings benefits" at one time. It overcomes the negative feelings associated with recognizing one is failing and it avoids the discomfort of taking difficult actions to make the needed improvements. This would happen, for example, if people realize they are coming up short on their leadership abilities and buy a book with a title such as, Become a Powerful Leader in 10 Easy Steps. Buying the book may provide short-term emotional relief, but reading it will not overcome the deficiency that caused the distress. Becoming an excellent leader requires more effort; we must pay our dues to make fundamental (auto-self) improvements.

People use this mechanism to avoid feeling badly about not completing a committed action. They attempt to fool themselves as well as others. Here is an example to help you understand the distinction. If you show up for work late and you explain a wreck on the freeway shut traffic down and trapped you, that would be a reason. If, on the other hand, you show up late and say rush-hour traffic caused your delay, that would be an excuse to help you evade your responsibility for meeting a commitment. Employees need to accommodate normal rush-hour traffic. Instead of taking responsibility for their own failures, people play the “blame game.” They evade taking responsibility themselves by blaming somebody else or some situation for causing their failure.

Summary of Evasion Gimmicks
Rationalization	Minimize importance: Replace action with a story that action not really needed
Procrastination	Keep putting off: Acknowledge task – keep it low priority – be "too busy"
Escape Rituals	Divert attention: Do something pleasurable when faced with uncomfortable task
Simplistic Solutions	Substitute: Acknowledge need – take related action that does not achieve goal
Excuses vs. Reasons	Pretend: Excuse away lack of action by pretending you have a real reason

Do you or anyone you work with ever use any of these evasion gimmicks? Part of the benefits transformational coaches provide is to notice and strip away evasion gimmicks from their clients. I've heard that some of these evasion gimmicks sometimes even occur in families.

An “unfair fight" occurs when the thinking-self tries to overpower the auto-self, such as by overcoming a compulsion or other bad habit by force of will. This "willpower” approach can work for short periods, but eventually the tenacious Comfort Imperative grinds down the thinking-self's success agenda. Because we unwittingly engage in and lose unfair fights so frequently, we consider it one of the fundamental principles of the bipartite mind theory. New Year's resolutions normally don't work because they attempt to use intentions to overpower an auto-self characteristic. Transforming an auto-behavior or reconstructing an auto-context usually creates discomfort. We present many techniques later to avoid the unfair fight and effect needed changes. Before providing techniques to avoid the unfair fight, we note that because habit changes create discomfort, we reflexively attempt to escape from internal reality wars, and the unfair fight usually fails, no wonder self-help efforts achieve such poor results.