Meditation as a Form of Violence

Everyone loves Buddhism. Being spiritual, trendy, and successful all at once — who wouldn't like that? This somehow became the image associated with Buddhist practices. Yet, when combined with the promise of effectiveness and success, the practice of self-compassion turned into a practice of self-violence.

The confusion is understandable. Buddhists explain that if you let yourself feel your emotions and take the time to look at them close up, they will lose their power. Highly effective people striving for successful success hear "meditation is the way to get rid of inconvenient feelings."

Indeed, feelings are pretty inconvenient when you are trying to do things you dislike, befriend people you are not interested in, or keep going when you are exhausted — all the things "highly effective people" seem to do. So, the promise of dispelling them is attractive. And some people say they even succeed at that.

So what's the problem? Well, there are a couple of them.

First, this approach, of course, turns Buddhism into its opposite. Buddhist practices start with allowing yourself to feel exactly what you feel, with no intention to change it. Buddhism teaches us to experience our feelings without running away from them: zoom in and feel what exactly it is like to be "sad," with any thoughts, fantasies, images, and bodily sensations that go along with it. When you let yourself experience a feeling, it eventually goes away — because everything is impermanent. (A similar idea underlies humanistic psychotherapy and Rogers's unconditional positive regard: exploring things exactly as they are with no attachment or aversion makes change possible.) Thus, suppressing your feelings is exactly anti-Buddhist.

Second, despite positive reports, the practice of talking yourself out of emotions eventually comes back to bite you in the ass. Of course, inconvenient feelings don't go too far away and come straight back when you loosen control (when you are tired, drunk, asleep, etc.). The same happens after cognitive-behavioral therapy: all the exercises and "coping skills" that are designed to change your thoughts and feelings soon break down and uncover deep wounds that were never dealt with.

Yet, the idea of controlling your emotions holds a definite appeal for those who value success more than their human nature.

Warm & Fuzzy vs. No-BS

Somebody recently asked me whether my approach to coaching was "warm & fuzzy" or "no-BS." People who know me outside of coaching expect my answer to be "no-BS" because I usually say what I mean without vague or flowery words. However, my answer is "both": coaching combines some warm & fuzzy elements with a no-bullshit approach.

The no-bullshit part is at the core of coaching. People come to coaching to change something or grow in some area. This requires intentionality and a readiness to get to work.

The warm & fuzzy part inevitably comes into play when the client runs into impediments. Those impediments may masquerade as practical but are often psychological. For example, the client's problem may sound like this: "my marketing counterpart is being really annoying and overwhelms me with time-consuming requests." That may sound practical until you realize that the client generally struggles with building strong relationships with stakeholders, which blocks his/her career growth. Of course, helping the client in this area requires more than a straightforward no-BS pragmatic approach. That's the place to help the client reflect on what work relationships mean to them, what they assume about their colleagues, how their assumptions work for them, etc. No action, just reflection. That is the warm & fuzzy part.

Moreover, oftentimes that level of warmth & fuzziness doesn't cut it. Popular psychology & coaching make it look like most psychological problems can be solved with a quick exercise, like "changing perspective" or "rewriting your life story." Of course, a grumpy skeptic like me cringes at this. To be fair, techniques and exercises like these do help, at least momentarily: they help adjust the behavior and gain a feeling of control. The problem is that such methods most often address the symptom rather than the root cause. The behavior changes, and the immediate feeling changes, but the person does not.

Thus, it is often a good idea to combine coaching with psychotherapy. Moreover, not any therapy but psychodynamic therapy. Alright, I have to go dodge all the rotten tomatoes now.

Becoming a Manager: Unlearn Everything You Know

When I first became a manager, two-thirds of my team quit within a month. This left me with one person on the team, which was extra embarrassing. I was especially sad because I had not taken that job lightly. I had read books about management and prepared for the new role. And yet, I clearly sucked at it. I don't know who needs to hear this, but here is what I learned from this experience. Becoming a manager requires you to unlearn everything you know: learn to lead instead of doing, learn to set an example of work-life balance instead of working your ass off, and learn to trust the process instead of worrying about your predefined plan.

The first thing you notice when becoming a manager is that you need to unlearn doing and start leading. Sounds fancy and trivial at the same time. This change is hard because your excellence at execution got you this job. Yet, your temptation to leverage that skill now by jumping in and doing the work yourself demotivates the team and brings poor results. It makes your team members feel like you are here to compete with them instead of using their talent. Nobody described this problem better than Liz Wiseman in her book "Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smart." Transitioning to leading means letting your team do their best work. You can't insist on your ideas, but you can learn to present them in a way that inspires the team to come up with something better. It's hard! When your employee brings an idea, you immediately see ten reasons it won't work — because you thought about the problem long enough. And you are probably passionate enough to present your arguments and let the best idea (yours!) win. Great. Now you have a resentful employee and a product that is only as strong as you are. Learning to find nuggets of gold in every idea allows you to enrich your product beyond your own talents. So, here is the gist: stop doing everyone's work; otherwise, they will all leave, and you will be left alone with a sad product.

The next thing that was hard for me to learn was to set an example of work-life balance instead of working my ass off. As an IC, you saw your ability to work hard and overtime as an advantage, and it is part of what got you promoted. So, after the promotion, you continue to do it— especially because you want to prove yourself in the new role. Yet, here is your new challenge: while you would really like your team to be just like you, you cannot openly say that you expect everyone to work fifteen hours a day, including weekends. So you tell the team that they should be taking some time off and not overworking. However, you are not very believable when you say that; your team senses that you are not genuine because you keep sending emails at 1 am and mentioning that you "finished that deck over the weekend." So, people understand that they are expected to do that too, and they pretend to be okay with it while secretly interviewing for other jobs. The truth is: your project is not that important. Nobody will die if it gets delayed; most of your deadlines are self-imposed. Meanwhile, your family misses you, and your health is deteriorating. Genuinely accepting the fact that your product should not come before your health, family, and life will give you a stronger team and a better product.

Finally, the third lesson that was hard for me to learn was to start trusting the process instead of worrying about my perfect plan. As a new leader, you likely have a good idea of what needs to be done in your product and when. You spent a lot of time thinking about it and came up with a whole project plan with milestones defining who should finish what by when. You may even have presented it to the leadership, and it felt good. Unfortunately, as you start working with your team, you realize that they are deviating from your plan: they take longer to reach a consensus, they bring in new ideas to consider, and they propose validating something you thought was certain. All of it frustrates you because you are losing control. So you spend a lot of energy trying to regain it: rushing people to reach premature conclusions, re-iterating arguments supporting your ideas, etc. This effort is exhausting, but it allows you to bring the team back on your schedule. However, the disagreements you rushed to ignore and ideas you did not find time to explore will pop up later in the form of growing resentment and product mistakes. Rushing the team to pursue a direction they are unsure about will lead to low engagement and a standstill further down the line. So it is important to trust the process: the team is making progress, even if their milestones do not match yours. Step back and let the team have the discussions they need to have in order to reach a consensus. The result will not match what you had in mind because it will be better.

Thus, these were the key lessons I learned by losing two-thirds of my team in one month: learn to lead instead of doing, set an example of a good work-life balance, and trust the process instead of enforcing an arbitrary schedule. Does this guarantee success? No. With some creativity, you can find more ways to screw up.