LifeWorks Today Podcast → 08 If Not Punishment, Then What?

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Welcome To Life Works today this podcast is provided so that together we can create a world in which all people love their lives our current human systems aren’t working the way of superior versus inferior or management versus employee or adult versus child we need a powerful positive and sustainable transformation this podcast is for you who seek to be happy fulfilled and peaceful so that your Abundant Life Works

today so welcome everybody to Life Works today this podcast is designed to bring you hope and new ideas in your personal and your professional life this show is about human systems a system saves you stress time energy and money and human systems are here to help us in how we think speak Act and feel whatever you learn in each episode of these podcasts will be applicable in your life at work or at home or even in the larger Community today’s episode will be one in which everyone can relate to especially if we’re stuck at home with our kids or something it will be a start to the answer what can I do when people frustrate me with bad behavior but before I dive into this podcast I want to review some things that I’ve covered in the past episodes because I think it’ll really help us in today’s program I also want to mention that because of the pandemic we’re doing this on zoom and I have a guest on the line who’s doing it even outside so she’s got some quiet and you might hear a few birds in the background or a few sound glitches but hopefully you understand that with all that’s going on in my recent episodes I mentioned that the work I do is based on the psychology of Alfred Adler and I want to just remind all of you of the five Concepts that he put forward that I’ll be refer referencing in today’s episode so ather said basically we’re social beings we’re hardwired to seek healthy belonging and significance so that we feel those four core feelings of feeling empowered lovable connected and contributing and when I think about misbehavior I think I might have given this example before even the person that is in a gang who’s instructed to kill somebody in order to get into the gang they might do that if the only place they believe that they can get their needs met for feeling empowered lovable connected and contributing is in a gang they will go that far with it because these needs are so important and there’s a really great set of movies that I just watched the last couple of nights and one was called it’s a documentary called happy and there’s another documentary called I am that was a directed in starred in by Tom shadec and those are really good because they give you a lot of data on on how we are truly hardwired to be connected and to be cooperative with each other even though it doesn’t always look that way so when we don’t feel that healthy sense of belonging and significance what happens is we fall into that inferiority complex and that shame spiral that I mentioned in an earlier episode and that is what is underneath all struggle and all negative behavior so it’s just good to remember that we’re going to be kind of hitting that over and over again all misbehavior is connected to the those four corn needs the second thing Adler said is we’re very subjective so we’re always facing circumstances and choosing how we interpret them we could be in the same family with a sies twin even and have a different interpretation of what we’re seeing and hearing and even though a lot of that is influenced by the conditioning of other people we’re ultimately the ones that decide and draw our own conclusions about what we see that’s why this psychology is called indiv idual psychology because our subjectivity is our own private logic and you really none of us in some ways we’re very alike and in other ways none of us are exactly the same at all the third concept is that we’re purposeful that means that everything we do has a goal associated with it or goals and a lot of the time those goals are unconscious but we are really trying to make things happen whether it’s what we wear how we think what we say what tone of voice we use and even when our goals are from limiting beliefs and fear we’re always seeking to cause certain things sometimes these things are unconscious because we’ve been taught to be afraid of ourselves afraid of our power afraid of our initiative or afraid that you know we’re going to get in trouble but everything has a way of being reverse engineered back to the intent or purpose the fourth thing that Edler said is that we’re self-determining because we have that subjective private logic we play a much larger role in creating our experiences and actually bending Life To What We believe is true if we look at each person and what they’ve created it’s largely self-created the fifth thing that Adler said is we’re holistic that’s really important to remember especially when you’re thinking about negative behavior everyone is trying to find their way back to that sense of belonging and significance because of being that social human being that we are and that makes our pathway worthy even if the methods we use take us totally off track I mentioned in earlier episodes about how the prisoners in a Florida prison when they were brought this edaran approach they got on track with their four core needs without going back to their criminal Behavior so when we know that even misbehavior is related to our search to get back to those four core needs we can be more understanding and become more effective in addressing that so today’s episode is called if not punishment then what redirecting negative behavior in this I’ll be talking with you about negative behavior including what causes it how we typically react to it and what are some of the more productive ways we could respond in the face of it and while negative behavior includes conflict it includes a lot more than conflict too so this is a really rich topic and today will be something of an overview with additional episodes coming up in the future to really actually take this topic and and go deep with it I’m going to be answering questions in this episode around why do people misbehave what makes it difficult to recognize certain types of misbehavior what have we’ve been taught are the appropriate reactions to misbehavior and what are some of the better ways to respond that most people have not been taught in other words what is redirecting negative behavior we’ll be getting into what’s the definition of that and how does that differ from what we’ve all seen modeled over and over again in today’s episode I’m going to be challenging conventional beliefs that many people have and one of the big ones is that people must suffer in order to behave better so think about yourself even how do you think and react when people do things that make you feel annoyed or when they make you really angry or they hurt you or you feel worried and burdened and concerned or you feel insulted so I want to share a few quotes and then I want to get right to introducing my guest today because that guest is just amazing and not only are we going to do today’s episode to introduce people to this topic but she’ll also be co-presenting with me on future episodes on this topic I always love to bring quotes to the table because I I just feel like it kind of grounds the intent and the emotion and the deeper element or Essence of what we’re covering so one of the quotes I brought is it always seems impossible until it’s been done and that was said by Nelson Mandela who better than to know how to overcome the impossible and really what I’m meaning by bringing this quote it always seems impossible to choose something other than we’ve been choosing for misbehavior until we see it actually work it’s act until it’s been done so I just think that’s such a fitting thing because I’m going to be challenging those conventional ways of doing it and here’s another one by Carolyn ma Carolyn mace is an author she’s a Mystic she’s a thought leader in a lot of spiritual circles and she made this quote in Insight the size of a mustard seed is powerful enough to bring down a mountain-sized illusion that may be holding our lives together truth strikes without Mercy We Fear our intuitions because we fear the transformational power within our Revelations and I see this over and over again I see people understanding the way humans need to be treated what causes certain problems with humans it often is striking down that mountain-sized illusion that feels like our lives depend on so you know even the sentence it strikes without Mercy it is merciful to learn a better way but it feels frightening to us because it really does transform us and so I encourage you to open to the transformation power within you especially as you listen to this episode if you determine that wow something about this feels right I’ve never really heard it this way or maybe I’ve heard it this way some of the time but when I hear it this way something in me feels like I’m resonating with it so hopefully you’ll have some of that experience even if you have more questions than information at first I want to introduce my guest because I know that she’s going to be a great help in some of the major themes of this episode I introduce you to Kristen schweer Kristen has been the manager of application development at Essa health for almost seven years she leads the analytics reporting team to extract load transform understand clean and present data to help departments leaders and individuals at Elsa Health to make decisions understand processes and answer questions she partners with all of the Departments for cross functional support and to improve processes she made manages teams that create systems for multiple industry projects and customer service she’s a key player in the integration of the workplace culture model from Life work systems which supports her skills to increase trust camaraderie and consensus for greater efficiency and success Kristen is also the mother of four children I met Kristen about four years ago when I brought our culture transformation process to her company Essa one of thear largest physician-owned Health Care organizations with over a thousand employees and when Kristen and I first met she told me that she’d already been studying an adarian psychology approach to improve her parenting and that’s exactly where I started when I first learned so it’s really a nice common Bond she was happy to have this reinforced in her workplace so Kristen not only has embrac the life work systems culture transformation process she has since then become a subject matter expert on the process and she helps to onboard new employees she’s uniquely qualified to speak on many of the topics that I’ll be presenting throughout the entire podcast series but none of them more than redirecting negative behavior not only does Kristen learn from Life work systems we learn from Kristen as she’s always seeking and learning and she’ll refer me to books and articles and video clips that really align with our work and then I can share them out with other other people in fact she recently sent me a clip of The Lego Movie that reflected a really good example of redirecting a very specific behavior so I’m really honored and excited to welcome her to our show so welcome Kristen I’m so happy to have you here with me on this topic thank you Judy I’m thrilled to be here with you do you want to tell the story about how I met you guys because originally you and and um you don’t have to name names but you were struggling and then you you got to see it okay yeah yes I can sometimes you have to see something to really believe it and I’d already been sold because I’d seen ad Larry and help my family but at work it I had a very interesting Dynamic with my peer I was having conflict in a relationship with another peer and it wasn’t anything personal our manager had explained it was kind something of an organizational or cultural shadow that those two positions had always had Conflict for whatever reason and when Judy came in to help our culture we quickly identified that this relationship the relationship between me and this peer was poor but we both wanted it to get better so we were willing to do whatever suggestions or whatever tools or whatever whatever Judy had advice on to make it better and we sat down and we used very simple tool the dialogue tool and we identified the lowest value of the eight values that built trust in the relationship this person told me the lowest value that I was giving and I told them the lowest value they were giving and we both gave a suggestion on how to improve it and what we wanted that to look like and then both of us individually went back and when we sat down with the dialogue tool I was almost in tears because I was so upset when when push came to shove and we actually sat down and talk very clearly about the the kind of weakness in the relationship I was very emotional and I’m not normally an emotional person certainly not at work but I was almost in tears and the person I was with wasn’t as frustrated but I could see that this was emotional for them too and we went through the tool and we identified the one value to make things better and they went back and they made a change and I went back and I made a change and it was almost as if a a bottleneck had opened or a dam had burst because we went from two people butting heads and almost being childishly wanting the attention of our boss or wanting to tattle on each other or something to working together as a team and out of everybody I work with I think of this person today as one of the best relationships I have and somebody somebody I really count on and respect that was not what was what it was like when we walked in so I have seen it work it almost feels like magic when you just throw yourself into it it’s it’s just amazing well Kristen first of all I want to thank you for sharing that story because it takes courage as a an executive to say I was at my wits end I was emotional I didn’t know what to do I couldn’t get past it on my own so just the vulnerability of that I really appr appreciate because that can really help a lot of people that say well I can’t admit that what I loved about that is it seemed like everything really cleared up quickly and I don’t think anybody expected that and that really was prior to me doing the culture transformation with the company it was just kind of the first inroad and I think the power of the tools was really showed themselves in that specific example and then they also showed up again when I did the next retreat with you all and after that you know we really started long-term relationship with ESS so I appreciate that you were that entry point and that both you and this other peer were willing to do the work and kind of get to see it doesn’t have to be painful so oh exactly yeah yeah so Kristen you want to just mention your feelings about redirecting negative behavior since you know it really well also said I think it’s magic I think that it’s it it ties into that one of those books that I recommended to you the hold me tight book about the marriage counseling her theories that we have it backwards is if we have a strong emotional bond we have really good communication and with redirect it reminds me the quality of my relationship with this person is more important than me getting my way in a way because what I really want deep down and what they really want when they’re showing these mistaken goals we can get without punishment we can get without conflict and we can get without one person winning or dominating over the other my favorite thing about redirect is that it it opens up a third way that I mean it sounds like ponies and unicorns and rainbows but it really works right it really does feel that way you know yeah and it and it’s you can kind of see how it fits with that quote It seems impossible until it’s been done yeah I appreciate you saying that well that’s because um one of the things I want to cover in this episode are the assertions that we make about negative behavior one of them is that we have these ineffective philosophies that we’ve all thought are the only options and one of them is being very punitive and punitive can look very sophisticated like just sneering at somebody or or sighing around them or something you know but it’s it’s a shaming pain inducing experience and then we can also believe in uh let me be permissive and use incentives and praise and all this stuff and those are both philosophies that people think are the right way but they’re actually not the right way and so it’s until we really understand that there’s a third option that you just mentioned but because we don’t understand that negative behavior is pretty epidemic like right now with the pandemic going on it’s even more obvious where people are weak in their ability to behave well and where they’re drawing upon some of their strengths to behave well and I’m sure that’s going to be a fluctuating thing right now so the more skills people have the better they can navigate through The Changing Times And even those Changing Times that happened before this pandemic and we’ll continue after this pandemic how do we manage ourselves because even in our work as you know Kristen we don’t introduce redirecting negative behavior until month seven and that’s because if we just created these stronger connected relationships like you described in that book we wouldn’t have to redirect so much misbehavior when we get to the redirect tool it’s still always going to be there but we don’t have to redirect so much of it because we’ve set up certain conditions and conversations so just the fact that we have so much negative behavior is important to recognize and one of the ways that shows up is in our engagement levels you know we we still see year after year close to 71% or over 71% some of the time of people who are either slightly disengaged moderately disengaged or very actively disengaged there’s a cost associated with that and part of it is that we keep pulling on those control models those control models embody permissive and punitive it reminds me of that quote or that story where one fish says the other fish has the water and other fish says what water and because we just live and breathe this punitive we we live and breathe these control models we don’t even we don’t even realize we’re not conscious to them it seems so normal that’s so true Kristen that’s why we called our first episode spitting in the soup because the the inherent permissiveness and punitiveness in control models is like you’re like you’re right we just think that’s the way the world functions and we don’t even know we’re you know in the water with it yeah or you know with with the relationship I brought up I didn’t even when I say the floodgates open I didn’t hadn’t even imagined something better so when I even me hearing you say oh there’s so much negativity and everybody’s so disengaged I start to feel defensive but I remind myself that this is what I was taught the the trickiest thing about punishment is that it seems to work in the short term like it seems effective you know like you can get somebody to to do an other directed rebellious or a sea level work you know it’s like on the scale of of ABC you know they can do they can kind of get things done so we we think it’s working when we don’t realize that if we do something else we can get a level work in engagement well yeah and I’ll even take it a step further it’s not that it seems like it works it actually does work right yeah the short term yeah it works short term and not and not even all of the time but sometimes it work short term like like when you put a gun to someone’s head but then you’ve completely set up an entirely hugee set of additional side effects and then I have to remind myself all the time like I know this stuff intellectually I’ve used it but I still go back to things in my own parenting mostly but I still can slide back into something and be unconscious about it and I just have to remind myself that one step at a time if I do just one% better in a year I will be astonished at what I can do so I don’t want to because I beat myself up constantly oh I should have redirected this instead of getting dominant or I should have done this but I’m getting better every time so I’m glad you brought it up though because as you know you know our bywords are compassion and curiosity if if we but the problem is it’s hard to be compassionate with ourselves because we’ve been taught punishment so then we we yes we punish ourselves we punish ourselves for punishing yes we’re double dipping exactly and you know part of it is the Forgiveness part of ourselves comes from realizing we’re the exception to the rule in understanding this information so we’re going to always be influenced by the current mainstream stuff going on even though we don’t want to be affected by it it still draws us to think yeah everybody else gets to use punishment why can’t I on some level sometimes yeah well it reminds me of I think it was in a parenting book probably a positive discipline it talked about how hard it is to be doing something new when everybody else is doing something different and to always be struggling against our defaults and the things that we have grouped the behaviors and and beliefs but if we teach this to a new generation or a new set of people they said you know when you you are brought up in a language you will always have an accent but if your children learn that language they’ll be fluent in it from the day they start oh I love that I remember when I first started doing this myself I felt like I was the only one in the world doing it I know I wasn’t the only one but there’s definitely more people learning this now and That’s so exciting it so we’ll all have an easier way of it the more we understand these common languages and tools and you guys have really done a great job of that at Essa getting on board with the same language and tools I don’t know about how this is affecting negative behavior but I know I got an email from your coo who was thrilled with the teamwork happening so that’s pretty cool that I have to believe that’s because you guys paid your dues and you’ve put in your time and you you know how to handle yourself so much better yeah and then like I you know my first my first reaction is thinking and we could do so much more you know this is the tip of the iceberg to what we could create and it still had amazing results yeah yeah so the fact of it is that so many of you are are already embracing it even as you go along it’ll just get stronger and stronger and and even the opportunity is here to say hey look at how well we’ve done where maybe five years ago we wouldn’t have so so you’re right it’s always that fight between you know I’m consciously incompetent that stage two and then finally saying okay today I’m going to be consciously competent but we can’t get there without encouragement so really the two ineffective philosophies are permissive and punitive but the alternative is how do you be firm and encouraging firm and respectful and that’s really what we’re heading toward even though we we’re kind of doing a little bit of a cliffhanger in the inter room I want to say another assertion about behavior is that all Behavior reflects our beliefs and intentions and most of those beliefs and intentions are below our Consciousness and so that’s why I mentioned earlier that everything we do is purposeful so when it comes to misbehavior let’s say there’s somebody sitting at their desk and the boss is yelling at them for not getting their work done it could be that that person isn’t doing the work because they really like on some level seeking out undo attention or it could be that they’re doing that behavior because they’re in that sort of mindset that says no I won’t you can’t make me you know no matter what that’s going to be my fallback that’s often what’s going on in a person when they’re in that purpose it could be that that person isn’t doing the work because they’re in some kind of pain pain and some kind of duress and so they’re going to actually strike out at other people it has nothing to do with the work or the job or the person at all or it could be that that person isn’t doing it because they deep down inside don’t think they’re capable even if they are capable they don’t believe they are or it could be that they’re not doing that assignment because they’re trying to prove to the rest of the world that they’re more special or important because they’re actually not feeling very important so even the same scenario in front of us could have five different reasons for playing out so that’s what I want the listeners to really think about we have these behaviors that are reflecting where our heads are at I’ve got two more assertions I want to make but before I do I want to make sure that I take a minute here about halfway through I always try to remind the listeners that life work systems is here for you we specialize in Performance Management through the healthy culture transformation or sometimes people just take a course and then they take another course but ideally it’s through healthy culture transformation so go to our website and learn more about us and how you can get involved with us including access to the information related to today’s episode and to future episodes so you can find us at life work systemsis plural.com subscribe to our podcast and find the main points on each podcast we invite you to also join our mailing list so that you receive information on free videos webinars articles surveys assessments my book how to contact us by phone or email so just about anything you want is on that website and when you go to our website and you look at the details of this episode you’re going to find resources that we’ll share with you in fact I’ll include the book that Kristen just mentioned and about a bazillion other pieces of reference material because she’s a researcher and a learner so we’ll get as many resources as we can to you on some of these topics and those that are related so Kristen I’m just going to come back and feel free to jump in on these one of the assertions that I want to mention is that all misbehaving people are discouraged it doesn’t seem like it always looks that way does it no not at all no it seems like most of misbehavior looks arrogant selfish lazy you know cocky uncaring the but the fact of it is I’m I’m just really asking people to assume that what I’m saying is true sometimes it can look discouraged it can look like somebody’s very down in the mouth but typically it doesn’t look like they’re discouraged what we mean by discouraged is it means that they’re not getting those four corn needs met and what’s also important is that our response to misbehavior has a profound and very significant impact so we don’t know that we don’t realize that that our response is the deciding factor so kristena I thought it would be really good for us to tell the train story and I didn’t know if you wanted to or if you wanted me to I’m okay either way the train story this has always generated uh quite an emotional response when I retold it so there was a big Burly man who got on a train and he was in a foul mood you could just tell it was emanating off of him and he was strong and he was intimidating he was sharp to other passengers and he was clearly drunk everyone in the train was very scared of him and they didn’t want to to assert themselves against him or tell them tell him what to do or to get out of the way or to stop scaring people an older man on the train notice this this large upset drunk worker who was causing the scene and the older man did what exactly the opposite of what a lot of people would have done and he welcomed him am I on track so far Judy yeah yeah he actually the first thing he said is hey what are you drinking right yes he welcomed he said hey what are you drinking how are you he was an old friend and everybody just watched this because they thought the man wouldn’t like this reaction and the man initially did not appreciate it and got even more belligerent and more overpowering and more towering and intimidating but this did not face the old man and he said come over here and sit with me what did you drink tell me some more and now I’m forgetting the rest of the story because I feel self-conscious that’s okay it’s a tough story so you’re very on track so it’s like train and track right yes so it is a tough story but I I want to do just a tiny bit of background in it and I love it that we’re doing it together I love it I even love hearing your way of telling it I just want to mention that this story is actually a story out of Daniel Goldman’s book emotional intelligence so those of you that have that book at home can pull this story out it was like one of the best parts of that entire book in my mind but what happened was when the old man said hey what you drinking the guy responded by saying saki what’s it to you anyway I mean he got like really trying to push back on that and the old man said instead of getting intimidated he said oh my gosh I love saki my wife and I we heat a little pot up and every morning and go out into our garden where we have these gorgeous pmen trees and the whole time he’s walking toward this laborer and then he said do you like Pon trees and by that time the guy’s kind of like looking at him like do I know you and he says yeah I like Pimon trees all right you know and he’s kind of calming down and then the old man says and I bet you have a great wife too and that was really a turn point for this man because he he looked at the old man and he said my wife died a month ago and I started drinking and today I lost my job over it and the old man he’s right up to him and he says oh my goodness you know you’re really struggling why don’t we go back to the back of the train car and talk it through because you’ve really been through a hard time and so they go to the back of the train and everybody’s kind of like whe you know we didn’t see that coming and then when there’s actually an observer that’s a friend of Daniel Goldman’s on the train and he looks back at the end of the train ride and he thinks oh my gosh that was brilliant and that’s what he says to Daniel Gman that was emotional Brilliance and so our response is the differentiator very often I think I just read recently that there’s police officers don’t have guns so because they don’t have guns they’re in a position where they have to learn all these skills to kind of bring people down from wherever they’re being violent or angry without the use of a gun or weapon and some of the American police have been sent to them to find out what they’ve been taught so that they don’t overuse weapons I just recently heard that yeah we forget I think that I I don’t know if the science is exactly right but the way it’s been explained to me when I’ve read about it is that we have a brain that has multiple levels and one of the biggest levels because we’re mammals is the lyic system and in order for that to be healthy we have to be emotionally connected to each other and it’s unconscious it doesn’t talk the emotional brain can talk to our logical brain but our logical brain can’t talk to our emotional brain which is why things like meditation or sematic or physical releases can work so well because they speak directly to the emotional brain I think what you’re really seeing when you’re saying that is that when we are a redirector our response is that of a person that’s maintained their Center you know even the train story The Observer of the train story was a man that was practicing a martial art where it was all about how do I be mindful when an attacker’s coming at me and I blend toward them so that neither of us get hurt even if I have to throw them or whatever I’m going to do it in a way where both of us are being helped and so when a person is redirecting it’s like the height of emotional intelligence because they have to be aware of oh I see what’s going on I see what’s being triggered inside me but I haven’t let it take taken over my amygdala you know my front cortex where I go into fight or flight I haven’t gone there and so from that place of recognizing what’s going on we manage ourselves and we manage the dynamic between the other person and us and it’s to some extent it’s a discipline and it it’s something that you have faith in after you’ve done it and it works but in the beginning it almost feels as difficult as it is when a dog first comes at us we don’t we just want to run and we have to school ourselves to have a different response it’s also come up recently because I so I like I I read horses and I have a horse and some there’s always these mystical horse Whisperers that you can see that contain these wild horses and there’s one trainer that’s really getting into it because he says he’s teaching horses to meditate and be present when a you know a half ton animal can tell that you’re listening to it you’re attuned to it it will relax and it’s just fascinating to me that what we’re seeing for for human centering and grounding we can affect other animals I mean not with words not with logic at all but just by being present I know that’s kind of off on a tangent I wasn’t anticipating but it’s so true I was watching that movie that I mentioned I am and they showed the work of heartmath and heartmath showing around us is this it’s not an aura but it’s actual magnetic energy fields that convey our emotions to one another and they even had one of the main characters hooked up to this Monitor and when he would think of negative things the little monitor would go way over to one side and that’s how we’re actually picking up each other’s feelings and so I love that you’re talking about horses that way and as you know I always have people in the culture process watch the movie Buck yes me that movie is a perfect example of what you’re describing he attunes himself and he teaches the horses to attune to him yeah and even in redirect too even if we’re just grounding ourselves even if we don’t even if the other person isn’t in on it in a way if they don’t know what we’re doing like it’s great like in our culture at S Health where we know what tools we’re using and we’re all in board but you can do this with somebody who has no idea what you’re doing and you’re not you know you’re helping them too were you going to say yes I was gonna say yes you’re not manipulating I want to pull your chain you know I want to say something that might sound wrong you are manipulating Behavior but we’re always manipulating Behavior we’re either manipulating it from our own fear or we’re manipulating it from our own belief and the goodness of people so manipulation has gotten a bad RP because we always think about how we’re using it selfishly and a lot of times we are using it selfishly if we’re in misbehavior yeah I guess the better word would be influencing influencing feels a lot better but really in reality they’re both kind of the same because you’re actually causing the changed Behavior yes are just like you manipulate somebody’s back when it’s out of alinement that’s a manipulation anything that you use can be used for good or evil in our first podcast we had that story about the eighth grader that had the peace pledge crammed down his throat so that was a good tool bad system manipulation is a good tool when it’s done out of a loving intent and not the kind of loving intent like I’m beating you with a belt because I love you not that kind of loving intent the kind of loving intent that actually feels loving like the man on the train by the end of the labor was sprawled ac across his lap sobbing yeah or even that Lego clip that’s so quick but you can hear the you know the actor when the when the person’s saying you are the most talented special Inc and you could tell he meant it like you are a powerful amazing person yes exactly and so our response getting back to that assertion our response has a profound and significant impact but we have to be absolutely wise and centered like I can’t treat a misbehaving person like that drunk I can’t treat him like a good human being if I don’t remember that he’s discouraged now when he came on the train he didn’t look discouraged he just looked mean and intimidating and thoughtless but deep down inside you could see he had actually had the symptoms of one of the goals called the goal of Revenge where he was in pain and probably in his family when men were in pain they didn’t cry when men were in pain they they avoided that feeling and they went and got drunk or something boys don’t cry and so part of the reason that we misbehave is because we’re in pain or we’re suffering something and we don’t have any idea how to get out of it in a productive way I mean like you have given me a million examples of how that’s happened with your family where you’re like hey why is this happening and then we talk of it through the redirect tool guidelines and you’re like oh yeah now I can really see how it’s that particular pattern the one of those profound ones that I’ve had there’s that work example with significance and then there was that person who’s politically pretty opposite of me and I didn’t even interact with this person but just grounding myself and reminding myself that they’re discouraged and I’m insecure the whole energy of it yes it’s absolutely an energy thing as well as a very PRI pragmatic you know like physical experience but it is an energy thing too and Kristen is mentioning one of five mistaken Behavior patterns called the goal of significance you’ll learn about that if you hang in here with this topic not necessarily today but as we go forward with it I want to go over just a few more things before we end today because hopefully you’re getting an idea that this redirect thing might be worth checking out and I’m hoping that you as the listeners can see that so I want to just tell you first of all what redirect is so that it’s not this big mystery it is a technique it’s a technique that helps people stop a cycle of limited thinking and behaving that’s coming out of discouragement and fear so that train story is a great example the guy was coming out of fear and discouragement he had lost his job he had lost his wife and he was in this place of nobody cares and I don’t know how to function I might as well just push everybody away and so the old man was able to use this technique he used to stop the cycle of limited thinking and behaving now I don’t know if he had ever been taught something to teach him to do that but somehow he had the skill to do what we teach in redirect so redirect is when somebody’s doing that they’re stopping a cycle of limited thinking and behaving it’s a method to diagnose and treat the true causes of negative behavior so when I said that that guy not doing his work could be for five totally different reasons how do we know which reason it is unless we have a meth method for diagnosing and treating it and it’s a respectful and honoring way that’s an alternative to traditional punishment or bribing or shaming or you know pampering or anything permissive or punitive so basically when a person is redirecting what they do is they first have to stop and take a breath and look for certain clues that we’re going to tell you about in other episodes so when you have certain feelings thoughts and inclin ations that tells you what pattern someone is in and once you identify that pattern which is called mistaken goals of fear or limitation the limiting goals depending upon the clues you recognize in yourself and then you focus on very specific incident when you’re redirecting because somebody could be doing the same behavior another time and it’s a totally different goal and then you have these steps you take depending on which pattern has been identified so a lot of times when you’re responding it’s kind of counterintuitive like that old man coming up and saying hey what you drinking that looks counterintuitive to some people they’d say that looked crazy but he was responding rather than reacting and he was responding to the best in that person not to the discouraged and fearful and limiting beliefs of the person so that’s kind of what redirect is Kristen I don’t think this conversation would be good without mentioning how it ties in with personal responsibility because those that have been listening know that this is a a responsibility based culture model and personal responsibility is at the core of so many things and even though I’ve been referring to responsibility I’ve never really gone over the personal responsibility chart with people so just so you uh who are listening know if you’re visual I’ll send you something that shows the personal responsibility chart in it so that you have a visual of it a lot of times people will take it and put it up on their refrigerator or keep it in their office so what personal responsibility really is at the core is it’s a belief system when we’re believing that we don’t have choices that we’re in situations where we have to that there’s an authority figure that has more control over us than we have over ourselves that’s the illusion we’re in when we’re in a state of mind called other directed so other directed just means I’m not directed for myself out inside out I’m directed by something other than my truest internal Authority so other directed is when we believe we have no choice we have beliefs attitudes reactions feelings about our reactions and our behaviors that all show up and they show up when we’re other-directed and they show up with something that I’m going to talk about a little bit later called self-directed so when a person is other directed and they’re in that mindset they’re going to be saying things like I have to I can’t I ought to I need to I’ll try probably I mean there’s a whole lot of words that can help you recognize when somebody’s in this I don’t really know what my choice is I don’t really believe I have a choice we can hear it in their tone of voice we can see it in their body language and we can hear it in their actual word choices so when somebody’s in other directed one of the attitudes they could take is and they can do both of these tracks of attitudes that I’m going to go through they could even kind of intermix them but one of them is to resentfully comply and then what happens is the way that they show up in their reaction their resentment they don’t feel responsible for that they feel as if the circumstances are responsible they don’t feel any personal so there’s a lot of blame that goes on when we’re another directed and the way that the person shows up is very much like a victim so when you think about the disengagement levels that I think I’ve talked about before when there’s a 55% of our population that is doing C minus work and just kind of doing the bare minimum they’re pretty much in resentful compliance you’ll hear them say on Monday morning uh it’s Monday again I guess I have to do this job again and so there’s a feeling of eore with that when a person does a different attitude they puff themselves up so they don’t feel that sense of I have no choice and they put on this fake power and then they Rebel and resist and when they Rebel and resist they don’t even see that they’re doing it a lot of the time and they certainly don’t think it’s their fault that they’re doing it and then what they’re doing is sort of revengeful or mean spirited so an example I like to give and this is a great example of how crazy it can look there was a guy that I dated one time and I asked him why don’t you wear your safety belt just out of curiosity and he said well I’m not letting the government call me and I said the government the government’s not even in the car with us but clearly he was somebody that was immediately when it came to putting his safety belt on he was going into this place of nobody’s going to make me do that even though he had young children even though he had not even checked in with whether he would live with the consequences well he was in knee-jerk reaction to an authority figure so that’s kind of what other directed means every person who’s misbehaving is somewhere in that realm of other directed and that’s why their behavior is so unconscious to them because they don’t even think they’re the one making the choices in essence people who are other directed aren’t aren’t grounded you know they don’t know what they’re feeling and they don’t really what they want in a way like you said they’re just knee- jerking yeah yeah I doubt he realized he was doing what he did I remember one time a man was in a class for parenting and was learning this and he said oh my God I have been living my whole life from this side of the chart but he didn’t really have awareness of it until he had heard it and heard examples of it but when we’re in a a really good place we remember we have choice so that’s called self-directed a person that does redirecting negative behavior has to be coming from self-directedness in order to do it because when you’re in self-directed you’re very aware of your freedom you’re very aware of I am choosing and when you’re choosing the first thing you’re doing is saying what am I feeling and what do I want and in the case of somebody misbehaving what am I feeling tells me what the other person is operating out of and then I can ask myself what do I want in the face of that which is very different than if I’m unconsciously just knee-jerk reacting to their behavior so when a person is self-directed they’re not going to make excuses for their choices they’re going to say I have choices even if I was Nelson Mandela in prison for 28 years I still have choices clearly he exercised choices or he wouldn’t have maintained his sanity under those conditions he came out a stronger leader so sometimes we’re tempted to say well aren’t there some things where we don’t have a choice no we always have a choice even if it’s in how we’re going to stay centered in in something I just shared an article I don’t know much about this person Terry wait or W he was part of the Anglican church and he was sent over to a country to negotiate for some hostages and he ended up getting kidnapped and he was in solitary confinement for five years and the article is about how he went through it and the lessons that we can learn and one of the things he said is that he decided he was not going to allow self-pity or destructive or spiraling thoughts he just wasn’t going to do it and so this is an example of a person who is in solitary confinement who has been kidnapped who’s being tortured and he still pressed his pants every day he he put his pants under the mattress to press them so he had some dignity and he made a conscious decision I’m not going to go into self-pity for this and he took it a day at a time it was just a wonderful story I thought it was beautiful well Christ not only is the story amazing which we’ll put on the website it’s amazing that you understand the power of that because sometimes when I’m teaching this personal responsibility chart people will get so defensive they’re defending other directed well yeah but have to go to work but what if this you know and they’re automatically like begging you to say you don’t have Choice yeah like that you give up your power in that sense it’s hard I certainly understand I’m often other director myself everybody is but yet you miss out on I don’t know keeping yourself in that spot is just keeping yourself so small it really is and you get that and a lot of people eventually get that that go through this work and they don’t drop out they stay the course they really get this they see that personal responsibility is actually joy and freedom it’s a sense of strength and integrity and power but we don’t know it at first because we’ve been so beaten down with our power so just to finish it out when somebody’s in self-directed not only can they say yes without it being fine you know or they can say no they can say no without it being uh no I won’t you can’t make me but they can also choose other ideas for how they want to handle handle something because they’re they’re more thoughtful about what conditions under which can they can say yes no or something in the middle and that’s a really amazing space that it opens up really redirect is in that space a third option and so a person in self-directed is always thinking of the negative and positive consequences of what they’re doing and they feel 100% responsible for their behavior and their thoughts their reactions aren’t reactions their responses and their behavior shows up as accountable and mature and fully engaged so really people that are the redirectors are people that are fully engaged they’ve become fully engaged and they’re high performing in engagement not that they’re perfect at it but that they do it more regularly and they continue to improve it I’m glad we brought that up that we made sure we included that in the conversation I think now would be a good time for us to end this particular episode as you all can imagine here we haven’t even really barely tapped in you don’t know much about the five mistaken goals and how you redirect them we have some other themes that we’re going to be going over in our next session but I just want to thank you for hanging in this far and hopefully you’re sort of chewing on this notion of wow I thought there’s no gain without pain and they’re telling me we don’t have to go through pain to get really big gains and hopefully you can see that from the train story hopefully you can see that from the way that we’re talking about this topic I want to thank all of you for listening today this podcast is brought to you by life work systems and myself Judy Ryan is the host and the CEO of Life work systems the intent of the podcast is to provide you with hope and new ideas for Greater Joy in your life and in your work for more information on our organization be sure to go to LifeWorks systems.com And subscribe to all of our offerings our podcast and mailing list and if you find that this episode or any others in the series have really been helpful and valuable to you please give us a fstar rating because this makes a difference in helping people choose to select our podcast which allows us to help more people so Kristen I look forward to doing more of these with you I really appreciate you being here and for the hard work you’re doing at Essa and in your home thank you Judy thank you for inviting me I look forward to doing more great so together with Kristen we invite you to join us in creating a world where all people love their lives and where you can grow masterful in making sure your life works today by now thank you for listening to Life Works today this podcast has been brought to you by life work system CEO and host Judy Ryan the intent of this podcast is to provide you with hope and new ideas for Greater Joy in your life and work for more information on our organization and earlier podcast episodes related articles videos and more please visit our website at lifework systems.com be sure to subscribe to our podcast and mailing list we invite you to join us in creating a world in which all people love their lives and where your life works today