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Welcome to Episode 92 of The Non-Anxious Leader podcast. I'm Jack Shitama, and before we get started, I want to encourage you to connect with me at thenonanxiousleader.com.

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I am finding I am learning more from people who are sharing resources with me, and then I am digging in and unpacking them. That is the case with today's episode. So if you have questions, if you have YouTube videos that you've watched, podcasts that are helpful to you or that you want more explanation on, please share them with me. This gives me more material to dig deeply into family systems and how to be a non-anxious leader.

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In today's episode, I am going through a video of Edwin Friedman on YouTube. It's about 12 minutes. It was referred to me by a coaching client. We were actually going through some notes and he used an equation that I was not familiar with. I asked him about it and he said it's from Friedman from this video. I'm really grateful because I got into this video and it was something I had never encountered in family systems theory or from Edwin Friedman. So I'm going to get into that. It's the idea of toxicity and response. So without further ado, here is Episode 92.

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In his book, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue, Edwin Friedman notes that the biggest factor in survival in a hostile environment is the response of the organism.

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A great example of this is Viktor Frankl's research in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, in which he found that the biggest factor in survival in Nazi concentration camps was this sense of hope derived from a vision of a better future. Friedman describes two types of hostile environments. One in which there is no chance for survival in this case, this might be a fish out of water or a human being underwater. The second type of hostile environment is the kind where the response of the organism will play a part in survival. Friedman notes that most all hostile environments that we face, are this second type of environment.

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The example of the Nazi concentration camp may seem like the kind of environment where there is no chance for survival. But as Frankl has demonstrated, the response of the organism does make a difference. This is Friedman's point. In a hostile environment, the response of the organism makes a difference. He uses an equation that is HE or hostile environment divided by RO, the response of the organism equals the strength of the toxicity in the system.

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The numerator in this case is the hostile environment. This could be your church council, some members of your family, or it could be conditions like racism or homelessness. A hostile environment can be anything in which there is difficulty in surviving, whether it's emotionally, physically, spiritually or all of the above. For most of us, this hostility has to do with the systems in which we function and in which we lead, and it is related to the anxiety in the system. If you know your math, the larger the numerator of a fraction, the larger the number. So the greater the hostile environment in a particular system, the greater the strength of the toxicity of the system.

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I should note that a hostile environment can be experienced as surrounding togetherness pressure, so one way that a hostile environment is experienced is in this pressure to conform to the norms of the system or to the norms and values of others who are trying to get you to change. As the equation would tell us, the greater the surrounding togetherness pressure, the greater the hostile environment in a system, the more likely the toxicity or the anxiety will increase in strength. Of course, this is, with all other things being equal. And the denominator of this fraction in this equation is very important because this is where we get to the response of the organism.

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As mentioned, the denominator of this fraction is RO, the response of the organism. I think it's important to clarify that this would be a healthy response, a self-differentiated or non-anxious leader response to the hostile environment by the organism. The idea here is that the strength of the toxicity in the system is more easily influenced by a focus on the denominator, by a focus on our own non-anxious response to a hostile environment, rather than focusing on trying to change the environment itself; trying to change the numerator.

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The general principle here is the greater the non-anxious response, the greater the self-differentiation to the hostile environment, the less toxic, the less anxious the environment will be. And likewise, the lesser the non-anxious response, the lesser the self-differentiation, the greater the toxicity or strength of the anxiety will be in the system.

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The question that is raised by this is, would you rather try to change your environment or would you rather try to change yourself? I'll get to that in a minute, but I want to break down some elements of the response of the organism. In the video, Friedman talks about the response of the organism either being a feeling of victimization or wanting to escape. These are responses that tend to reduce self-differentiation and therefore the denominator in this equation. The smaller the denominator gets, the greater the strength of the toxicity in the system.

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And as Friedman notes in the video, if the denominator goes to zero, the toxicity goes to infinity. Not likely to happen, but sometimes it may feel that way. I think of a response of victimization in terms of both kinds of reactivity. The first would be adaptive reactivity in which we give in without standing up for ourselves. To the extent that we are adaptive in response to a hostile environment, this reduces our healthy response and therefore increases the toxicity in the system.

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The other form of reactivity when feeling victimized is getting defensive or argumentative, trying to prove our own rightness in the situation. This is more about trying to change the environment than it is about a healthy response.

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Regardless, to the extent that we are more reactive, our healthy response goes towards zero, and this will increase the strength of the toxicity in the environment.

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Friedman also mentions the desire to escape. Rather than feeling victimized, this tendency to escape, would be moving toward emotional cut off. One way to deal with a hostile environment is to disconnect. We know this doesn't solve anything. All this does is increase the anxiety in the system and therefore the toxicity.

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Friedman's point in the denominator is that a healthy response can reduce the hostile environment. It can reduce the strength or the anxiety in the system. Whereas, a reactive response will increase the anxiety, the toxicity in the system.

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Which brings us to the numerator, which is the hostile environment. Actively trying to change the hostile environment is likely going to bring our healthy response to zero. We are going to be more reactive. This is where I believe it's helpful to understand the difference between process and content.

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Trying to change the hostile environment will get us mired in the content. We end up trying to come up with rational arguments and logical reasons why people should actually change their mind. It becomes a conflict of wills. But we know that people don't like to be told what to do. To the extent that we focus on content, we are likely to get more pushback and entrenchment in positions of those who are anxious.

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Not only will it not decrease, the hostile environment is likely to increase, and therefore so will the anxiety or toxicity in the system. Understanding that a hostile environment is about process and not content helps us to focus on our own response instead of the content of the hostile environment.

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And here's the great paradox. We tend to convince ourselves that it is easier to change the hostile environment than it is to change ourselves. Likewise, we are reluctant to work on changing ourselves because there is typically pain involved. But there's going to be pain involved in either effort.

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Trying to change the environment will enable us to avoid taking responsibility for self and will increase the anxiety and hostility in the environment. That's painful.

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On the other hand, working to change our own response may require us to look into what's behind our own anxiety and what unresolved pain and issues we have to deal with. That's no fun either.

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The paradox here is it's easier to focus on trying to change the hostile environment, but it is less effective. Conversely, it is more painful to work on changing ourselves, but it will make a bigger difference in reducing the anxiety of our own response and therefore the anxiety in the system.

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The benefit of this, of doing our own work, is that it will not only increase our healthy response in the current situation, but it will enable our long term ability to lead through self-differentiation. To me, the point of Friedman's equation (a hostile environment divided by the response of the organism equals the strength of the toxicity or anxiety in the system) is this: We can either try to change our environment or we can try to change ourselves.

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Changing the environment will not only not work, it will make things worse. Whereas, working on ourselves, taking responsibility for self, is the mark of a non-anxious leader. The more we do this, the healthier we get, as well as the systems that we lead.

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That's it for Episode 92. It's a shorter one, but I really enjoyed watching the Friedman video and then unpacking this in terms of what it means to be a non-anxious leader. I hope that you have found it helpful. And again, please feel free to connect with me at thenonanxiousleader.com. This is how I get ideas for future episodes. Until next time, thanks and goodbye.