The King’s Speech: Perspective Shifting

People of all sorts have a tendency to take one aspect of themselves and treat it like it’s their whole self. It’s a kind of psychological shorthand. Someone says “I’m an engineer” rather than “I work in engineering,” or “I’m a soldier” rather than “I’m in the military.” But this thinking is a tremendous millstone for people who have to confront serious challenges in their lives. Example numero uno is Bertie (Colin Firth in the recent film The King’s Speech), a.k.a. Albert Frederick Arthur George, the Duke of York, and much later, King George VI.

As portrayed in the movie, Bertie’s label for himself is ineffectual stutterer. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t splutter and stammer in almost any social situation or when he wasn’t utterly terrified of his father and of not living up to his royal responsibilities. He has tried various treatments, all of which failed. And he has become convinced that a stutterer is just what he is and what he always will be.

The perspective shift comes after a trick demonstrated by Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) that allows Bertie to hear a recording of himself reading a passage from Shakespeare with no stuttering at all. That’s when Bertie’s self-label begins to get fuzzy. He can see Bertie the man and the stammering he suffers from as two distinct things.

Reframing, Part III: Practicing the Reframing Process

I've been writing about the process of reframing: redirecting your attention to the motivational and enlivening aspects of what you’re planning on doing, and defining problems you encounter as incidental challenges rather than barriers.

So how do I put this reframing idea to work? I’m going to use the process of writing blog posts to practice it.

I'm reframing my writing process to make it less stressful

Reframing, Part II: Reframing and the Barrier Reflex

I recently wrote about Paul Miller—the self described one-armed dwarf who was one of the most resilient and upbeat people I’ve ever met. Now, a few months after his death, I’ve had a chance to think about some personal change lessons to take from him.

I’m something of a worrier by nature, a glass-half-empty type. When I think about trying something new, my initial reaction is to focus on the barriers that stand in my way. I call this the barrier reflex. The barrier reflex is a knee-jerk, unconscious response that can make it hard to get motivated, hard to get moving, and hard to get out of first gear.

One way past the barrier reflex is through reframing. This is a way of changing the meaning you make of the situation by redirecting where and how you focus your attention.

Reframing, Part I: Eulogy for a "One-Armed Dwarf"

Looking at a situation from a wholly new angle is a powerful technique for change—something psychologists call cognitive reframing. I’ve seen many examples. One that sticks with me came from Paul Miller. In this post, I’ll give one piece of his story, the part that I witnessed. In the next post, I’ll explore some reframing Paul seemed to do so effortlessly that I didn’t really understand it was happening until much later.

Paul Miller

The first time I met Paul was at the dinner table at my cousin’s house in Washington, DC. Paul, who was a little over 4 feet tall, was wearing khakis and a maroon knit shirt with one empty sleeve. He seemed like an inquisitive, upbeat guy who happened to be working crazy hours at the White House while staying in my cousin’s guest room. (Paul’s wife and kids were in Seattle, where had been working as a law professor.) He also fumbled with his food, just a bit. He talked about the foibles of working in the White House office that deals with job vacancies and political appointees—a dicey and complicated business. One day was the day to look for possible Hispanic appointees, another day was African Americans. But he didn’t seem too impressed with himself. Neither his dwarfism nor his missing limb came up at all. (He did talk about the convoluted process he needed to go through to give his daughters, when they came to visit from Seattle, access to the White House playground built for the Obama girls.)

What I didn’t learn until later was that Paul’s arm had been amputated only two weeks before.

Paul was learning to redo everything in his life one-handed without betraying any frustration or changing hi demeanor. He didn’t miss work. He’d been flying home to Seattle every few weeks to get chemotherapy to treat the tumor in his arm. And until the amputation, most colleagues had no idea what was going on.

Alex the Chocolate Alchemist

Alex and an old chocolate roaster

Taza Chocolate is to regular chocolate what a nutty seven-grain bread is to white bread. It has a slightly grainy texture, depth, and a certain hint of fruitiness.

I think of Alex Whitmore, the driving force behind Taza, as a chocolate alchemist. He never set out to be a chocolatemaker, though. Alex got his degree in anthropology in 1999. Rather than work for a dot-com like many classmates, he worked as a yacht captain, sailing Walter Cronkite's 60-foot sailboat up and down the East Coast. Later, he moved to Portland, Oregon, where he waited on tables. That’s where he hit rock bottom – not knowing what to do with himself

I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was living with college buddies. I was totally depressed. The gray and rain of the winters destroyed me.

Alex became a licensed sky diver, earning money stuffing parachutes into packs. Then it was back to Boston, where he managed a fleet of cars for ZipCar. Then he briefly lived in Chile, where he taught English and rode for a semi-professional bike racing team.

Building a WikiLeaks That Would Last

I recently argued that while WikiLeaks' activities may be decentralized, it appears that its leadership under Julian Assange is not, and that makes the organization vulnerable. So, how might you build a better WikiLeaks?

Make it look more like Al Qaeda.

Given the controversial nature of its activities and the tendency to make powerful enemies, you’d need a WikiLeaks that could function well even when one or more pieces or people were out of commission. WikiLeaks would be better off if there were actually multiple WikiLeaks organizations. For example, WikiLeaks could be a network of regional groups unified by common goals, principles, and shared methods for doing the work, but functionally independent. In organizational parlance, this is what’s called an affiliate network, and it’s common in the nonprofit world and among social movements. Contrast an affiliate network with a branch structure where there are multiple locations that are wholly controlled by a central entity, kind of like McDonalds or Starbucks. (There's plenty of research about how affiliate models can best be used.)

This Lesson on Nonprofit Leadership Brought to You By MLK

How can you fix a rudderless organization without bringing in a real leader? In the nonprofit world, you can't.

It hasn’t gotten much front page treatment, but the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—Martin Luther King’s civil rights group—appears to be close to the end. There have been years of mismanagement, a lack of direction, some hanky-panky with funds, and a board rift that sent two board factions to court trying to decide which was the real one. After a judge ruled last year who was in charge, the plan was for Bernice King, MLK’s daughter, to become president. Well, now there’s a rift between the newly empowered board and King. Apparently she doesn’t want to be a figurehead, and the board wants to be in charge. I don’t necessarily think King was the SCLC’s savior. (MLK’s children have a pretty sketchy leadership history.) But I do know that in the nonprofit world, you never see a turnaround without a strong leader at the center. And interference from meddlesome boards is one of the main ways leadership is thwarted.

Why does leadership matter so much in the nonprofit world? In the for-profit world, making money is all that matters. There are many cases of mediocre business leaders turning around a company and managing to make money. (The history of U.S. car companies is full of these kinds of CEOs.) The typical nonprofit exists to address a social problem or serve a population (one place it can fail); it has to engage allies in addressing its core issues (a second place it can fail); it also has to please funders and monetary supporters (another place it can fail); and it has to keep mission-oriented employees engaged (yet one more place it can fail). That's a lot of things for a good leader to address, and virtually impossible to do successfully with weakness at the
center.