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Welcome to Episode 127 of the Non-anxious leader podcast, I'm Jack Shitama. And before we get started today, I want to remind you that I will be running my four-week course online, the Non-anxious Leader Family Systems Basics that runs from June 30th to July 27th.

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Everything can be done asynchronously, but there are three live sessions during that four-week period. They will be recorded. But if you want to engage with me live, you can do that through the course. It cost $198 and you can find out more information by going to thenonanxiousleader.com and clicking the treats and online courses link in the upper right-hand corner.

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Today, I'm going to circle back to episodes 124 and 125, where I looked at the slides from the presentation by Mindy Reynolds on Differentiation of Self, she was taking a look at things from the boin perspective.

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And one of the things that came out of those slides is a worksheet called Five Characteristics of Self Differentiation. And those five characteristics, I think, help us to look at Self-differentiation in terms of self-definition and self-regulation. So I'm going to break those down today. The first three characteristics of Self-differentiation are characteristics of Self-definition. The first one is having a sense of your own limits as well as the limits of others. This, as Friedman would say, is knowing where you end and where another begins.

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This is all about taking responsibility for yourself and not taking responsibility for anyone else. It is focusing on being able to define yourself and not define others. And the way Reynolds puts it is that you respect the rights of others, but you don't let them intrude upon your own rights. So this is a healthy balance between knowing that other people have the right to believe what they want to believe. But at the same time, they can't force you to change what you believe.

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You can be open minded. You can listen, you can engage, but you don't allow others to define you. And in the same way, you don't try to define others. This is the healthiest way to engage in relationships, and it really does come down to setting appropriate boundaries. An important point that Reynolds makes about this is that this comes from within rather than being adaptive, rather than allowing others to define you. And one way to think about this is that this is intrinsic. This is comes from who you are and what you believe, not from being defined by others.

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This means that even though we may try to please others in certain cases, we do this out of choice. We don't do this to help define ourselves. We are not looking from for the affirmation from others to make ourselves feel good. We have that affirmation coming from within. I love when we think about the great commandment in the Bible that one of the things that were called to do is to love our neighbor as ourselves.And in that we assume that we love ourselves first so that we can love others in a healthy way.

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The second characteristic of Self-differentiation, according to Reynolds, is clarity about what you believe. This idea of clarity is that you really know what's important to you, what your values are, what your convictions are, what your goals are, what your beliefs are. As she asks, what would you die for and what's not worth it. Understanding this and knowing that this comes intrinsically, this comes from within and not from being defined by others enables us to stand firm in our convictions in a healthy way.

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And that leads to the third characteristic of self-definition and self-differentiation, which is courage. The courage to take stands the way I like to say it is to take a non-anxious emotional stand. And when I say emotional, I don't mean that you get emotional. It's not filled with emotionality. It just means that we're able to take a stand in which we say what we feel and what we believe in a healthy way. As you know, the reason that taking stands requires courage is that there is going to be surrounding togetherness pressure, there is going to be this sense of disapproval from others who may disagree with us.

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The important part of this is it's not only being able to take a healthy stand, but it's being able to remain a non-anxious presence in the face of reactivity. We know that when there is pressure to conform, when there is disapproval, when there is reactivity, the tendency will be to give in to move back towards the other side because we don't want to cause trouble. Of course, when we do this, this is considered adaptive behavior, we are adapting to the togetherness, pressure that comes from others in the system.

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And when we do that, we typically start to resent others because we are not able to stand up for ourselves. So having this kind of courage comes from knowing that what we believe is important to us and it's worth taking a stand. And if we are able to do it in a healthy way, if we are able to understand our own limits and the limits of others, we are able to then work through it and remain a non-anxious presence. This gives other people a chance to then settle down.

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It gives other people a chance to come to terms with the fact that we are not budging. And one thing that I have found is that when you remain firm in your convictions, but you do it in a healthy way, you create the emotional space for others to think about who they are and what they believe. We know from the concept of sabotage that initially they will get worse, they will get more reactive, they will get more disapproving. They will come back at you with more anxiety and anger.

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But the ability to remain a non-anxious presence, to have the courage to know who you are, your own limits, and also where you end and where another begins enables you to create the kind of healthy space that will move the system forward. This is what Non-anxious leaders do, and it is not easy. Most of the time we're not very good at it, but we get better at it when we are more aware of this process and we can be intentional about how we respond to the anxiety in the system.

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So to summarize, the three aspects of Self-definition, which are the first three characteristics of self-differentiation are this idea of limits. Knowing your own limits and the limits of others, knowing where you and and others begin, and also clarity, no.2 , clarity about what you believe. And no. 3, courage to take Non-anxious emotional stance. So the fourth and fifth aspects or characteristics of self-differentiation have to do with, according to Reynolds, Self-regulation. As I mentioned, there are three characteristics that come under the heading of Self-definition and there are two characteristics that come under the heading of self regulation.

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The first of those two under self-regulation is the ability to stay on course. This is having the resolve to remain a non-anxious presence in the face of sabotage. And the reason it comes under self-regulation, I believe, is because it means that you are able to control your own reactivity if you try to take a non-anxious emotional stand. And then there is sabotage, there is reactivity from others in the system and you are not able to self regulate if you are not able to control your own reactivity or if you're not able to keep from adapting in either case, then you are going to go back to your previous position.

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You're going to allow the system to not move forward. So while this idea of staying on course may seem to have to do more with resolve and courage and clarity, it also has to do with being able to keep from making the situation worse. And that is what self-regulation is about. That is the ability to control your own anxiety and keep it from making the situation worse. The ability to stay on course comes from our own resolve, from our own courage and clarity and the ability to self regulate.

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But this also leads to the fifth characteristic of self-differentiation and the second characteristic of self-regulation, and that is being able to stay connected no matter what. As Reynolds says, staying connected in spite of it all. This, again, is about being a non-anxious presence. It's about controlling our own reactivity so that we can avoid a conflict of wills or even worse, an emotional cut off from those who are most anxious and who are trying to disrupt our own path of Self-definition and self-differentiation.

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Likewise, this means that we are also able to regulate our own impulse to adapt and give in to others to avoid conflict. Most of us have a tendency to go one way or the other. Some of us are more reactive and tend to lash back at the surrounding togetherness pressure the sabotage that occurs when we try to take an emotional stand and others like myself tend to be more adaptive. We tend to give in instead of taking a healthy stand. Neither one is good because it prevents us from truly being able to be who we are called to be while at the same time remaining connected in a healthy way to others.

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This is the essence of self-differentiation. It is the essence of non-anxious leadership, an ability to be who you are, to say what you believe while giving others the freedom to disagree and not giving in or getting in a fight. The reason that Reynold's classifies staying connected to others in spite of it all under self-regulation, because she rightly points out that this is about managing your own anxiety, not the anxiety of others. There's nothing you can do about the anxiety of others, and managing your own anxiety is the key to remaining a non-anxious presence in many respects.

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If you have been listening to my podcast, there is nothing new here. But what I think is helpful. This is what I found over three decades of working through Family systems theory and trying to apply it to my own life, especially in terms of my family of origin and my role as a leader. Is this the more times I hear this and the more ways I hear it, the better I start to internalize it in a way that helps me to function as a non-anxious presence.

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There is definitely a large leap from understanding it in my head and then being able to put it into practice. But the more I understand it in my head, the better I am able to reflect on situations and understand what did I do well, what could I do differently next time and how can I get there? And those are the conversations I have in my own head and sometimes the conversations I will have with others to try to work to get better.

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And that's what I want to encourage you to do. I want to encourage you to just keep absorbing these concepts and then thinking about how they apply in your own family situations and in your own leadership situations. And I think as you do that, you will get better at actually responding well in the moment. And as we know, this comes from self-regulation. First, even though Reynolds has self-definition as the first three and self-regulation as four and five in these characteristics, I believe in practice you work on self-regulation first, which then create space for self-definition.

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Growing as a non-anxious leader is difficult, but it is possible and it takes time and it takes consistent effort. So if you're listening to this podcast, I believe that's what you are doing and I believe that you can grow in to that non-anxious presence. That's it for Episode 127, I want to encourage you to connect with me at Thenonanxiousleader.com. I get emails frequently about people's situations and I try to give helpful feedback. And if you want me to actually use it as a case study on this podcast, I will happily do that, as I'm always looking for ways to apply these principles and help people to understand them better.

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So until next time, thanks and goodbye.