Mind management…
A bear walked across my deck in Virginia… I stood perfectly still … completely calm, absolutely terrified.
Both. At the same time. I did not resolve that contradiction in 40 seconds … I stood inside it.
Bears are a lesson in managing your Mind. The interesting contradiction: calm and terrified are not supposed to share a nervous system, and… both fully true, neither one canceling the other. Senior leaders I coach live a version of that moment weekly: do my people have the right information to manage well? More directly, did I say out loud what my Mind knows they don’t? You do not get the bear as an excuse.
…and she wrote a whole song terrified…
By the fall of 1995, the woman singing the rawest song on American radio was also a former Canadian teen-pop star who had been dropped and passed over… both things at once, and she never hid either. The second single from Jagged Little Pill leaned all the way into that. “Hand in My Pocket,” released as the follow-up to the angriest debut single of the decade, is a completely different animal… wry, loose, almost cheerful, and built entirely on contradiction. It holds 2 opposite true things in the same breath, over and over, and never once picks a side. Broke and looking ahead. Lost and hopeful. Sane and overwhelmed.
The song became 1 of the album’s defining hits precisely because it refused to resolve. Nobody sings along to it because 1 half of it is true. They sing along because both halves are, and it is the only pop song on the radio honest enough to say so.
The Team needs both halves of you
As the senior tech leader running the calmest room in the building … you are managing 1 of those things and hiding the other. The confident half goes to the all-hands. The other half rides home in the car.
Your Mind is not malfunctioning when it hands you 2 true things at once. That is it working. The steadiness your people read on you does not come from resolving the split … it comes from knowing both halves are there and neither one is driving.
manage at the self level is the 10-second act of naming the state of your own Mind accurately… because a leader who has mislabeled himself will mislabel everything downstream. The clean read on the room starts with a clean read on the reader.
manage yourself first, and the team gets a leader who is not spending energy on the cover story. Both, out loud, before you are “live”
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: before your next hard meeting, name the 2 true things to yourself. Both, out loud, in the car.
Schedule time with me here. I handled the bear… I can be your One Hand in My Pocket…
