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Welcome to Episode 112 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama and once again this week, we are going to have story time from Friedman's Fables.

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If you don't have this book, it is definitely a must read, a must have, in your family systems library. Today's fable is called "'Round in Circles" and I will read it in its entirety and then I will break it down, give you my take on it.

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Please obtain a copy of Friedman's Fables and read "'Round in Circles."

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And the moral of the story is the most difficult habit to break is breaking the habits of others.

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This is one of my favorite from Friedman's fables, and I want to focus on three takeaways today.

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The first is nobody likes to be told what to do. When we tell others what they should be doing, we are not self-differentiated. We are trying to define others. We're focusing on the other person. And when we tell somebody what to do, they actually will almost automatically resist. I know this is true for myself. I know that when people tell me that I have to do something, I must do something, I should do something, there is an automatic reaction inside of me that just doesn't want to do it.

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Now, that's not rational. It's not mature. And sometimes I need to really check myself to think about, well, maybe I should do it, maybe I do need to do it. But my automatic reaction is to push back. And that's the thing we need to learn from this fable is when we try to tell other people what to do, when we try to define them instead of define ourselves, there will not only be resistance, but there will actually be the opposite effect.

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Instead of them wanting to do what we are telling them to do, there will be resistance, there will be pushback. And as I have mentioned in previous podcast episodes, the recent research shows that when people push back, when they defend their position, when they fight for what they believe in, they actually further entrench their position. So when we get into a conflict of wills over telling somebody else what they need to do, we are almost certainly going to experience pushback. The result of that pushback is that the other person is going to be further entrenched in their position, resisting what we tell them to do.

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The second takeaway from this is that seriousness can really bind our thinking. The fly is not without fault here. The fly is so serious. He's so focused on the idea that he has to get to the other side that he almost can't think straight. That's what the moth is actually seeing in him.

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The moth actually uses the word perspective, that perhaps the fly needs to look at things from a different perspective. But he is so serious that he cannot allow himself to. Now he's feeling under pressure. He's got only a few hours to live and he feels like he needs to accomplish his task. But how much is this like when we are feeling under pressure, when we are in anxious situations and we are super serious?

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In fact, the best thing that we can do in situations like that is get some perspective by doing something differently, not in trying to approach the problem, but actually getting out of our own head. Doing a hobby, doing something we like, seeing some friends who are outside the system that we're in that is causing us problem, whether that's a family, a congregation or an organization.

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By getting some perspective, it reduces the seriousness, reduces the intensity of the situation, and helps us to realize that it's not our entire lives. It may make a big, big part of our lives, but it is not everything. And doing something that's outside of that system that is enjoyable, that helps us to enjoy life and be less serious will definitely give us some perspective. It will help us to not be the fly.

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And finally, there is the moth, he is not without fault either he's trying to tell the fly what to do, and that is something that is really easy for us to do. We can get in the habit of being able to see other people's problems more easily than we can see our own. It's easy for us to want to give advice, to want to tell people what to do. And as I said, this is not something that's going to go over well.

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But the other part of that is when we focus on defining others, when we focus on other people's situations and trying to tell them what they need to do, rather than focusing on ourself and understanding what we need to do, perhaps how we could help the other in a helpful way, not just telling them what to do.

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But by focusing on somebody else, we lose perspective in our own situations and it makes it more difficult to self-regulate. When we are focused on defining others, when we are taking responsibility for others, instead of taking responsibility for self, it is harder to self-regulate. Our automatic responses become more likely. And in this case, that's what happened with the moth, because he wasn't taking responsibility for self, he wasn't able to realize that his natural instinct to go towards the light would end up killing him.

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I think this is a good warning because when we are thinking a lot about somebody else, about how wrong they are or what they need to do or what's wrong with them, even if we don't ever express it, we need to ask ourselves, why are we spending so much time on the other person and why can't we focus on taking responsibility for self? And that is the big takeaway, I think, from this episode. Stay in your lane, take responsibility for yourself, and let others be responsible for their own problems.

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Sure, you can observe, you might even advise. But when you try to break the habits of others, when you try to live somebody else's life for them, when you try to get them to do something they don't want to do, you not only get pushback from them, but you lose focus on taking responsibility for yourself. So if you want to be a non-anxious leader, stay in your lane.